Analysis of dynamic psychological processes to understand and promote physical activity behaviour using intensive longitudinal methods: a primer

ABSTRACT

Physical activity behaviour displays temporal variability, and is influenced by a range of dynamic psychological processes (e.g., affect) and shaped by various co-occurring events (e.g., social/environmental factors, interpersonal dynamics). Yet, most physical activity research tends not to examine the dynamic psychological processes implicated in adopting and maintaining physical activity. Intensive longitudinal methods (ILM) represent one particularly salient means of studying the complex psychological dynamics that underlie and result from physical activity behaviour. With the increased recent interest in using intensive longitudinal data to understand specific dynamic psychological processes, the field of exercise and health psychology is well-positioned to draw from state-of-the-art measurement and statistical approaches that have been developed and operationalised in other fields of enquiry. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of some of the fundamental dynamic measurement and modelling approaches applicable to the study of physical activity behaviour change, as well as the dynamic psychological processes that contribute to such change.

KEYWORDS:

• Intensive longitudinal
• dynamic
• vector autoregressive
• continuous-time
• GIMME
• physical activity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note: We refrain from discussing required sample size in terms of ‘statistical power’ in our review as statistical power pertains to frequentist, not Bayesian estimation methods (e.g., DSEM and CT-SEM; A. E. Gelfand & Wang, 2002).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Vanier Fellowship awarded to the first author.