Monday, November 06, 2006
Health and Fitness Research – A PhD Working Title
Martyn Queen, a new member of the Sport and Health Sciences Subject Group, has recently been researching in the area of health and fitness in relation to his PhD. Martyn brings to the team a wealth of experience, particularly in the health and fitness area, and will be taking a prominent lecturing role on the new HEPA degree programme.
His research to date has generated a working title, “Identification of the societal influences on the health and fitness patterns adopted by an adult population “ and although the study will be located primarily within the qualitative paradigm it will be informed by quantitative data in order to establish health and fitness lifestyle patterns. Already into his second year, following the completion of a pilot study, ethical considerations and a comprehensive literature review, it is hoped that the main study data will be collected on physical activity to establish levels of fitness through standard physiological measurements and survey responses. It should then be possible to make judgements and develop theoretical frameworks about the subject’s levels of fitness, against standard criteria.
Additional health data will also be collected through survey responses on the number of symptomatic episodes relating to disease and illness over a given period of time. The impact that this has on the subjects levels of functional health will be determined and judgements on the subject’s levels of health will be made.
Having established levels of, and made judgements about, the subject’s health and fitness, positivist and realist theory will be used in an attempt to analyse the impact that society has had on the health and fitness patterns of the subjects. Interviews will then be conducted in order to determine the societal influences such as that from the media, family, social class, demographics and peer group, that have either affected the subjects health and fitness patterns in a positive or negative way.
Lance Doggart
