A research study, using smartwatches and questionnaires, hopes to determine how students’ physical activity changes as they transition from high school to post-secondary education.
This project follows participants from different provinces to see why physical activity decreases during the late teenage years and how those changes can also affect well-being and mental health over two years.
Lead Researcher, Dr. Matt Kwan, says the project builds on his two decades of research going back to his college days in Alberta and Lethbridge, looking at how the transition from high school to college is an important pivot in how exercise either changes or declines.
“Overall, we see consistent declines in activity. Understanding this from a population level, where we had a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The declines across that broader adolescent through to emerging adulthood period, and then understanding those that went into post-secondary to those that didn’t,” Kwan said in an interview with the Calgary Journal.
Kwan says that the limitations of the previous study beforehand could only capture information for research one day out of the year, but for the new study, there have been more adjustments to check the activity daily.
“We assessed them once a year and followed them after they transitioned into post-secondary or into the workforce,” Kwan said. “The challenge with that study was that we only had assessment periods once a year. So that’s why this study is really focusing on trying to get some high-resolution physical activity data over two years.”
Kwan said that using different survey questions helps understand what students’ motives are during that time period of using the smartwatch.
“Participants will complete a questionnaire every three months and then also complete a series of those mini questionnaires for four days within each of those seasons as well,” Kwan said. “Five times a day, we’re going to be asking them to give us a sense of where they are, what they’re doing, some of that contextual information, but also understanding what their motivation is in real time.”
Kwan said that transition period from high school to post-secondary is a critical period for young adults, so watching their physical activity change gives them the perspective of how they adjust.
‘Many people are moving away into a new environment, new academic work mode and expectations, job expectations, and so, I think at the end, this is an important developmental period where people are gaining a lot more autonomy,” Kwan said. “Even if they aren’t moving away, they’re probably going through a lot of changes from something that’s more structured in high school into something far less.”
Kwan also hope this research study helps better understand why activity levels change after high school.
“We’re looking forward to being able to kind of understand more, with high-resolution data, what’s going across a shorter period of time.”