ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2025
Analysis of Reddit Discussions on Motivational Factors for Physical Activity: Cross-Sectional Study.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- What Patients With Asthma Share When No One Listens: Multimethod Observational Study of Patient Narratives on Reddit.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDespite the ample benefits of physical activity (PA), many individuals do not meet the minimum PA recommended by health organizations. Structured questionnaires and interviews are commonly used to study why individuals perform PA and their strategies to adhere to PA. However, certain biases are inherent to these tools that limit what can be concluded from their results. Collecting data from social media channels can complement these studies and provide a more comprehensive overview of PA motives and adherence strategies.
objectiveThis study aims to investigate motives for engaging in PA, as well as the associated strategies to achieve these goals, as stated by a large number of people on a social media site.
methodsWe searched for users' responses regarding PA motives and adherence strategies in Reddit forums dedicated to PA and analyzed the data using (1) unsupervised clustering to identify topics from the textual comments and (2) supervised classification to classify the comments into the detected topics. A panel of experts participated in both steps for annotation and validation purposes.
resultsWe analyzed 1577 unique user comments (representing 1577 individual users); of those, 1247 were linked to physical appearance (mentioned in 298/1247, 23.9% of the comments) and improving physical (235/1247, 18.9%) and mental health (211/1247, 16.9%), indicating these as the main motivational factors. The main strategies people used to adhere to PA were habit formation (373/1247, 30%), goal setting (173/1247, 13.9%), enjoyable activities (151/1247, 12.1%), socializing (121/1247, 9.7%), using media (111/1247, 8.9%), using different apps to monitor PA (35/1247, 2.8%), and financial commitment (32/1247, 2.5%).
conclusionsThis study presented a novel approach using a language model to investigate why people engage in PA and the strategies they use to adhere to PA using wide-scale, self-disclosed content from popular social media channels.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.