Abstract
Listening to adolescents’ voices has been important to promote meaningful physical activity (PA) opportunities. Therefore, an updated systematic review of the available qualitative literature on adolescents’ perspectives on the barriers and facilitators of PA was conducted, according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Studies published between 2014 (date of the last systematic review) and 2020 were searched in the Web of Science, EBSCO, and SCOPUS databases. Based on the inclusion criteria applied, 30 out of 8069 studies were included in the review. A thematic analysis was used to inductively and deductively analyze the perspectives of ~1250 adolescents (13–18 years). The studies took place in 13 countries from different continents. The main PA barriers and facilitators of PA were presented and discussed around five higher-order themes: (1) Individual factors (e.g., psychological—motivation, self—efficacy; cognitive—knowledge, understanding; physical—motor skills); (2) social and relational factors (family, friends, significant others); (3) PA nature factors (fun, school-based PA and physical education); (4) life factors (time and competing activities; life-course); and (5) sociocultural and environmental factors (e.g., availability/access to PA facilities, programs; urban/rural zones). By transnationally framing adolescents’ voices, this study provides updated evidence and discusses innovative implications for developing tailored interventions and pedagogical strategies aimed at promoting active and healthy lifestyles.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) updated the guidelines on physical activity (PA)
The criteria were as follows: (1) Studies that explored the perspectives of adolescents on PA, as well as on PA facilitators and barriers and that directly reported adolescents’ perspectives/voices regarding those issues; (2) empirical studies that were observational and that used qualitative methods to gather data; (3) adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years, healthy, and from urban and non-urban areas living in developed or developing countries; (4) studies published in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish; (5) studies published between 2014 and 6 June 2020; and (6) articles published in scientific journals
The remaining 4991 studies were screened according to the title and abstract for relevance, resulting in another 4900 studies being eliminated from the database
Summary
An updated systematic review [13] of the available qualitative literature on adolescents’ perspectives on the barriers and facilitators of PA was conducted according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Guidelines [22]. Studies were excluded if they: (1) Were not focused on exploring the perspectives of adolescents on PA facilitators or barriers; (2) did not directly report the ‘voice’ of adolescents; (3) had an experimental design or were a review; (4) did not use qualitative methods; (5) did not involve participants aged 13–18 years old; (6) did involve participants with diverse age ranges but the mean age did not belong to the 13–18 years old age bracket or the data for the diverse age groups was not presented separately for this specific age group; (7) were focused on participants with non-healthy conditions (e.g., obese; mental health issues) or physical disabilities; (8) were not published in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish; (9) were not published between 2014–2020; (10) were not articles published in scientific journals with peer review (e.g., conference papers); and (11) scored low for both reliability and usefulness in the study quality evaluation based on evidence for policy and practice information (EPPI) criteria [23,24] (detailed below)
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