What makes physical activity fun for urban adolescents? Listening to youth and opening Pandora's Box

A common recommendation for programs promoting adolescent physical activity (PA), particularly among girls, is to make programs “fun.” Yet surprisingly little research has examined what makes PA fun for adolescents. Moreover, are the same factors involved when PA is obtained through structured programs versus independent activities chosen during discretionary time? This is critical because physical education programs alone cannot provide sufficient activity to meet PA recommendations. This presentation combines qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus groups) and quantitative (survey) data from extensive formative research with multiethnic urban adolescents to describe their perspectives on what makes PA fun. Results suggest that social, physiological, and affective processes combine to create fun, with key gender differences detected. Males most emphatically endorsed PA as fun when it provides channels for expressing aggression and when “rush” or “glory” are involved: “You just, like, get that burst of power and that confidence, and you can't stop, like, whoo whoo.” Females' strongest endorsements of PA as fun focused on a continuum of skill and competence, with fun concentrated at either extreme: performing well or “messing up” when playing with friends. These gender differences and other identified elements of fun – e.g. adapting environments to create PA opportunities that may be unsafe (making up active games at construction sites, jumping fences and running in the dark) – may present ethical challenges for interventionists. This presentation will conclude by discussing intervention implications and opening a dialogue about how to reconcile values and preferences of multiethnic urban adolescents with other intervention principles.