Hi, I m Deemah Alqahtani and today I m happy to present our work entitled: The Effect of
Goal Moderation on the Achievement and Satisfaction of Physical Activity Goals.
This work was done at the University of Manchester with Caroline Jay and Markel Vigo.
Among the different aspects people track, physical activity tracking is one of the most
common.
However, there are multiple barriers that could hinder engaging with daily physical
activity tracking such as having unexpected circumstances occurring during the day or
when achieving everyday goals proves infeasible due to having fluctuating routines.
These unmet expectations influence motivation and performance and can cause disappointment.
In line with this, social cognitive theory states that the perceived self-efficacy
of individuals affects their subsequent behaviours and the goals they set to themselves.
Self-efficacy is the person s self-perceived capability to perform a certain behaviour
or attain a specific goal.
It can predict performance such that people with high self-efficacy tend to set higher
goals and are more strongly motivated to achieve them.
So our question was, motivated by its potential, what is the effect of the moderation of physical
activity goals based on daily perceptions of self-efficacy on goal achievement, goal
adjustment and satisfaction about physical activity?
That is whether this moderation would help self-trackers engage with their actual goals,
update them more frequently so they meet their fluctuating routines and feel better with
their achievement.
To answer this question, we developed FitReflect, an app that enables users to report their
daily self-efficacy and moderates their physical activity goals based on the reported self-efficacy.
It also allows users to reflect on their goals, satisfaction with their physical activity
and the factors affecting it on a daily and weekly basis.
To evaluate our intervention we conducted a mixed-methods study with 14 physical activity
trackers and we gathered data from questionnaires and a 4-week field experiment with the FitReflect
app.
And we found that moderating physical activity goals based on daily perceptions of self-efficacy
increased goal achievement rate and closeness to goal for step count.
Participants adjusted their primary goals more often to align them with their expectations
and as a result, they were more satisfied with their physical activity.
We conducted thematic analysis on the responses received in the exit questionnaires and we
found interesting insights.
Here I will highlight two examples and I invite you to read our paper to find more.
Participants reported that goal moderation gave them a sense of achievement and increased
their motivation to achieve their goals as P5 says: It motivates me to do my best and
achieve my goals.
. . whether I achieve my overall goal or the moderated one.
Moderating goals based on self-efficacy also helped participants to reflect and think realistically
about their goals.
For example, P7 says: Updating my confidence every day was good for me in two ways: being
reasonable about what I could achieve for that day and challenge myself to achieve more
than my prediction, which made me feel satisfied at night if I did it.
To conclude, in this work we showed that while a primary physical activity goal can be perceived
as an ideal goal, a moderated goal that mirrors a person's self-efficacy can be a stepping
stone towards bridging the gap between what the users can actually achieve and what the
users aspire to achieve.
Also, facilitating periodic reflection on goals gives users opportunities to adjust
them to align them with their expectations and capabilities.
Finally, our work opens opportunities to explore its implications on other populations and
types of tracking where it's important to keep people motivated to track but also consider
their self-efficacy and true capabilities.
Thank you.