Active Indoor Play: Salient Beliefs Held by Adolescents from Rural Middle Schools

Introduction: Health professionals are advising youth to play outdoors in order to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation of 60 minutes of daily physical activity. Yet, many children are unable to play outdoors due to safety concerns or lack of facilities. Therefore, indoor active play could be a viable substitute. The purpose of this study was to identify beliefs underlying adolescents' decision to play actively indoors. Methods: Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 86 adolescents (mean age 13±.1 years; 58% female; 96.5% white) from three rural middle schools in the Midwest. Six open-ended questions were asked about consequences, social referents, and facilitators of indoor active play. All responses were recorded verbatim and a content analysis was performed to create categories for individual responses. A frequency analysis (PASW version 18.0, Chicago, IL) identified the most salient categories for each of the six questions. Results: 38% of participants identified a physical benefit as an advantage of playing indoors and the most salient disadvantage was the fear of breaking something (35%). While participants felt that no one would disapprove (37%), parents were the most frequently mentioned approving group (70%). Having a viable space (29%) was identified as a facilitator of indoor active play, whereas time (42%) was the top barrier. Conclusion: This study shows the utility of a salient belief elicitation for identifying common behavioral beliefs of adolescents. These findings can be used to develop closed-ended questions for a quantitative analysis of adolescents' salient beliefs toward indoor active play.