Improving motivational interaction styles of physical activity promotion and sports professionals: a feasibility study of the MotiStyleSport intervention

In teaching physical education (PE) classes, counseling patients, and coaching young athletes, motivational interaction by professionals results in stronger and more high-quality motivation (Haerens et al., 2018) and sustained health behaviours, including PA in low-active individuals (Ng et al., 2012), as well as reducing drop-out from sports (Quested et al., 2013). Thus, improving motivational interaction behaviours among professionals can complement other PA promotion strategies. For an intervention to be effective, it first needs to be feasible and acceptable among participants. Acceptability reflects the extent to which the intervention is considered appropriate, and can be seen as a predictor of intention to engage in the intervention (Sekhon et al., 2017). Acceptability involves perceptions of e.g., ease, ethicality, and burden of an intervention. This study is part of a larger MotiStyleSport -project, where the overarching aim is to understand how PA and sports professionals adopt more motivating interaction styles. This project further developed a previously implemented training aimed at physical education teachers (Renko et al., 2020), and expanded the target group to include more occupations and changed the delivery mode from face-to-face format to an online version. Also, more strategies to support interaction behaviour change were included. We will now, focusing especially on key uncertainties, conduct a feasibility study of this intervention. The overall aim of the study is to collect evidence in order to optimize intervention and study procedures. Most research questions in this feasibility study are exploratory in nature, and this pre-registration presents the two sets of hypotheses. Firstly, we expect the intervention to be equally acceptable to all professional groups: sports coaches, PA counseling professionals (including physiotherapists, nurses, health nurses, PA counselors), and PE teachers, and that secondly, we expect, overall, different aspects of the intervention to be rated acceptable by the participants.