Using Narrative Inquiry to understand physical activity connections through the lifecourse

The Leisure Industry offers the widest and most easily accessed range of physical activites to the general population. However, uptake needs to be improved. Sedentary lifestyle choices are significant contributors to a growing chronic disease problem in the UK and even though exercise is shown to improve health outcomes of chronic disease sufferers, adherence is low. Much work has looked at barriers and enablers to exercise to identify drivers that might improve exercise uptake but less has been done using a lifecourse theoretical perspective and that is substantially quantitative. This study looks at physical activity through the lifecourse using qualitative Narrative Inquiry, to explore trajectories of physical understanding and experiences.
The study used a pragmatic paradigm, a constructivist ontology and the epistemological position that the meaning of events in the life can be known through narratives. It was privileged above other similar methods that take a life history or biographical approach by acknowledging the unstructured and broad perspective of lives lived, enabling participants to consider their relationship with physical activity through the priorities they placed on events.
Eight middle aged men and women were interviewed by telephone, lasting between 30-50 minutes. Two women and two men were self-reported life exercisers and two women and two men were self-reported non-exercisers. The results showed participants demonstrated strong personal physical activity themes that directly linked secondary school education and physical activity in middle age. It suggests life path signifiers are determined, identifiable and are mapped between school and middle age. This finding is novel and may be helpful to both government when developing health policy and the leisure industry when designing physical activity products.