Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Promoting physical activity, and reducing physical inactivity, has been recognized as a crucial component to include in both the treatment and prevention of childhood obesity. The physical activity levels of youth are increased when social support to be active is provided by their parents - this makes targeting parents with health messages appealing. Health messages can be framed in terms of the benefits of engaging in the health behaviour (gain-framed) or the costs of not engaging in the health behaviour (loss-framed). Health messages are most effective when they are framed in the appropriate way. The purpose of this study is to determine which message frame is most effective when creating health messages for parents so that they provide support to their children to be active. The study participants will be parents with at least one child between the ages of 8 and 13. This study will be a randomized controlled trial with three different message framing conditions (gain, loss, and mixed-frame) which will each show a physical activity messaging campaign targeted at parents. Measures will be taken before and after the messaging intervention of the parent's behavioural beliefs, attitudes, intentions, planning and actions taken towards providing social support for their children's physical activity. Groups will be compared using statistical analysis to see which message frame had a larger association with increasing parent social support intentions and behaviours over a 4 week follow-up period. The results from this study, as stated in the purpose, will allow for more effective health messages for parents to be created in order to increase child physical activity and reduce inactivity. Increasing child physical activity will not only benefit their personal health, but will combat the obesity epidemic to benefit our population health as a whole.