Week 10 Research Progress

In the past week, I looked into my research field in a broader scale . Instead of focusing on social fitness apps, I changed it to social media in general, also change the impact on young people’s work out activates to impact on young people’s physical health.  I re-framed my research question to How social media affects young people’s physical health? I was hoping the existing researches could show the positive co-relation between social media use and health. However, a lot of research brought up the negative consequence on health of using social media.

To be brief, these researches approach the relationship between social media use and people’s health from the following angles.  

·         Social media reduces level of face to face contact, which can increase the risk of serious of health problem such as cancer, stokes. Etc. 

·         Social media traps people in self-criticism.

·         Social media doesn’t hold the authority; it may misguide people by wrong health information.

·         Long hours of using social media has negative impact of sedentary behaviors on physical health.

·         Blue light exposure affects sleep quality.
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html)

(http://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2683&context=honorstheses1990-2015 -  Social support)              

(http://greatist.com/health/social-media-affects-fitness)

Different approaches provide me a more comprehensive view on this issue and helped me outline the structure of my research. I am still working on finishing up my survey, hope it can be sent out by this weekend.

Week 9 Research Progress

In this past week, I changed my research filed and decided to focus on How social fitness apps impact young people's (21-30) workout activities. The reason why I changed my research to fitness apps is that I think the implication of the exploratory research is more related to everyone's life and health.

As people get more and more conscious about their health issue, apps and wearables have been developed for tracking workout data. When users get the data in a nice presentation, the idea of sharing them get generated organically. Just like sharing other kind of information, we want present our identity, value, self-fulfillment, etc. And one possible extra bonus, we can motivate other people to join us to workout. When we see other friends are all doing certain things, the extrinsic motivation triggers us to join them, and hopefully it can be transformed to be an intrinsic motivation and help people to build up the habit of doing exercise.

I think it would be very interesting to find out how exactly social fitness apps can impact our workout activities. Does them motivate us? How long does the positive effect can last? What kind of research has been done in this field? etc.