How do people begin and sustain physical activity as their circumstances change? This study, coauthored by Junghwan Park and published online in Health Psychology Review on September 30, 2026, develops an integrative model that connects individual experience with broader behavioral theory.
The researchers used participatory systems modelling interviews with 26 adults to map participants' accounts of everyday physical activity. They connected those accounts with established behavioral constructs through interpretive synthesis and ontological mapping, then refined the model through expert consensus and comparison with existing frameworks.
The resulting prototheory proposes that combinations of personal and situational conditions create opportunities to act. How people value physical activity changes with their current state, while feedback from experience reshapes those valuations over different timescales. The contribution is a set of testable explanations for engagement and sustainment, with implications for adaptive, person-centered interventions. The proposed mechanisms require further empirical testing.