‘When I have time pressure, sport is the first thing that is cancelled’: A mixed-methods study on barriers to physical activity among university students in Germany

ABSTRACT

The transition from school to university has been found to be associated with a decline in physical activity (PA). As regular engagement in PA plays an important role in preventing obesity and various chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, a deeper understanding on barriers that hinder university students from being physically active is necessary. We therefore conducted a mixed-methods study which built, first, on conducting a quantitative online survey across Germany (n = 689; 69.5% female) to examine barriers among university students. Afterwards, we explored these barriers in more detail by conducting 20 in-depth qualitative interviews (65.0% female). While we identified in our quantitative survey that especially time-related and motivational barriers hindered university students to engage in PA, our qualitative interviews indicate that connections between these barriers seem to exist. Moreover, the qualitative interviews enabled us to identify additional transition-related barriers (e.g., missing routines in everyday life, difficulties in finding a new sports club) that were not included in the quantitative questionnaire. Thus, such barriers should be incorporated into quantitative instruments to assess these barriers in larger samples of university students in the future. Moreover, our findings provide potential starting points for promoting PA in German university settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Barriers
• physical activity
• university students
• mixed-methods-research

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Helen Dümmig (H.D) for her valuable assistance in coding the qualitative data. In addition, they are grateful to Dr. Raphael Herr, for performing the parallel analysis and the confirmatory factor analysis. The authors thank all university students that participated in the NuPhA-Study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

J.H.-K. and K.D. designed the NuPhA-Study, collected and analyzed all data, and drafted the manuscript. A.L. contributed to the design of the qualitative study part, provided valuable intellectual input throughout the writing process and critically revised the current manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2020.1792159.

Additional information

Funding

The quantitative part of the NuPhA-Study was partially funded by “Institute Danone Ernährung für Gesundheit e.V., Haar, Germany” [project number: 2014/01]. The funding organization had no influence on designing, analyzing, or interpreting the data. In addition, they had no role in writing or in publishing of this manuscript.