Social dimensions of situational interest in young adults in an exergame setting: an exploratory study

Résumé En

More than 25% of people around the world do not practice enough Physical Activity (PA)(Guthold et al., 2018), which makes it a public health issue. Antecedents of motivation for PA were primarily studied through individual factors. However, from an interactionist perspective, individual motivation is influenced by interest in activity. For Deci (1992), interest is defined as an interactive individual-environment experience, supported by activity and social context. For twenty years, situational interest theory propound a construct and methodological tools (e.g., EMIS-EP ; Roure et al., 2016) to study students' interest in a learning task in Physical Education (PE). Situational interest in a PE setting has been reduced to ve sources or dimensions (Chen & Darst, 2001) : novelty, challenge, attention demand, exploration intention, and instant enjoyment. Nevertheless, to date, alternative dimensions of SI have never been examined out of PE, in other PA contexts. Moreover, given the recent debates on the structure of situation interest construct (Garn, 2017), the purpose of this study is to explore and to adapt SI construct in an exergames setting and, more specically to explore social dimensions of the situational interest construct in PA with young adults participating to solo, cooperative and competitive exergames. A qualitative design including 20 young adults was used. They participated in exergames according to 4 conditions: (1) single player, (2) single player with peer support, (3) competition, and (4) cooperation. Three types of data were gathered: declared PA (IPAQ-SF; Craig et al., 2003), PA levels during exergames (ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometers), and retroactive verbalizations about experiences in exergames (semi-structured interviews). The analysis followed an inductive thematic analysis steps (e.g., Braun & Clarke, 2006). Using mixed method, data relating to declared PA, PA levels and qualitative categories were processed by discriminantfactor analysis to identify possible prototypical experiences. The results will consist of dimensions that will emerge from the qualitative-quantitative dataanalysis. We expect an extension of the situational interest construct with the emergence of hypothetic social and context-specic dimensions. Integration of PA level data is supposed to consolidate content validity of the experience reported by participants (triangulation). From this exploratory study, one perspective is to develop a new scale for measuring situational interest in PA, integrating the experience' social dimensions. A better understanding of situational interest in a exergames setting allows to design PA program, supporting lasting motivation for PA in sedentary young adults (Chen & Hancock, 2006).