- Title
- Do birds of a feather flock together within a team-based physical activity intervention? A social network analysis
- Creator
- Edney, Sarah; Olds, Tim; Ryan, Jillian; Plotnikoff, Ronald; Vandelanotte, Corneel; Curtis, Rachel; Maher, Carol
- Relation
- Journal of Physical Activity and Health Vol. 16, Issue 9, p. 745-751
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/jpah.2018-0585
- Publisher
- Human Kinetics
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Background: Homophily is the tendency to associate with friends similar to ourselves. This study explored the effects of homophily on team formation in a physical activity challenge in which "captains" signed up their Facebook friends to form teams. Methods: This study assessed whether participants (n = 430) were more similar to their teammates than to nonteammates with regard to age, sex, education level, body mass index, self-reported and objectively measured physical activity, and negative emotional states; and whether captains were more similar to their own teammates than to nonteammates. Variability indices were calculated for each team, and a hypothetical variability index, representing that which would result from randomly assembled teams, was also calculated. Results: Within-team variability was less than that for random teams for all outcomes except education level and depression, with differences (SDs) ranging from +0.15 (self-reported physical activity) to +0.47 (age) (P < .001 to P = .001). Captains were similar to their teammates except in regard to age, with captains being 2.6 years younger (P = .003). Conclusions: Results support hypotheses that self-selected teams are likely to contain individuals with similar characteristics, highlighting potential to leverage team-based health interventions to target specific populations by instructing individuals with risk characteristics to form teams to help change behavior.
- Subject
- homophily; social contagion; health behavior; SDG 3; SDG 5; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1462287
- Identifier
- uon:46428
- Identifier
- ISSN:1543-3080
- Language
- eng
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