15 May Moving towards a new normal: The social climate of physical activity – Sign up for the Webinar Here
You may remember when people smoked in restaurants and recycling programs didn’t exist. But in the last 35 years, the popularity of smoking and recycling in Canada has drastically changed. This shift is thanks to awareness campaigns, policies and legislation working together to alter the social climates – the general feelings, attitudes, beliefs and opinions within societies or groups – of smoking and recycling.
Social-ecological models suggest that one strategy for increasing physical activity participation within our population is to reconstruct the social climate through changing social norms and beliefs about physical activity. This leads to the following questions:
- Can we change the social climate of physical activity in Canada?
- Can we motivate people to get active like we motivated them to quit smoking and/or recycle?
To further unpack these questions, ParticipACTION recently developed a public-facing report, Moving towards a new normal: The social climate of physical activity (Vers une nouvelle réalité: Le climat social de l’activité physique). This document also provides resources to help readers promote and more easily integrate the term social climate.
This report builds off the foundational work undertaken by members of ParticipACTION’s Research Advisory Group:
- Fagan et al. (2023). Re-assessing the social climate of physical (in)activity in Canada. BMC Public Health, 23, 2548. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-17436-3
- Fagan et al. (2023). Assessing Support for Policy Actions with Co-Benefits for Climate Change and Physical Activity in Canada. Journal of Physical Activity & Health, 21(3):256-265. https://doi.org/10.1123/jpah.2023-0617
Join Dr. Leigh Vanderloo (AHKGA’s Treasurer) and Dr. Markus Duncan’s webinar for the sector on Wednesday, June 4 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. ET. Sign up for the webinar here.