Introduction

Health and well-being are two concepts that are widely discussed within today’s society. A major perspective in health and lifestyle research is to investigate what determinants are associated with health. When it comes to the delivery of health interventions several different approaches have been suggested.

Methods

The meta-synthesis was chosen for synthesis of research studies using a health and lifestyle the review format and analyse meta-questions. The process included the following five phases:

1. Literature search for articles.

2. Selection of relevant articles after repeated reading and appraisal of the articles.

3. Extraction of data from each article and creating a list of findings as key phrases, ideas and concepts for each individual study.

4. Determining how the findings of the selected studies are related and translating findings into one another.

5. Synthesizing the translations to produce a new theoretical interpretation.

Results

The search yielded a total of 561 unique citations and finally 24 citations remained. Of those 11 studies focused on health determinants, while 13 focused on interventions for health promotion. The meta-synthesis led to four recommendations for the design of future intervention studies. (1) scientific disciplines should collaborate in the design, implementation and evaluation of the study. (2) to use theoretical frameworks that focus on health determinants and to apply longitudinal studies with a repeated measures design.(3) involve behavioral interventions. (4) to design face-to-face intervention studies.

Discussion

Determinants was related to a physical active lifestyle, more specifically high quality school programs for physical education. It could be a starting point for a nationwide approach of daily physical activity in whole society. In all intervention studies physical activity behaviors were included as outcome or intervention program. It is therefore speculated that physical activity behavior could be discussed as one mediator between health determinants and health outcomes.

References

Bailey, R. (2006). Physical education and sport in schools: a review of benefits and outcomes. Journal of School Health, 76, 397-401.

Dodge, R., Daly, A., Huyton, J., & Sanders, L. (2012). The challenge of defining wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2, 222-235.

Kahn, E. B., Ramsey, L. T., Brownson, R. C., Heath, G. W., Howze, E. H., Powell, K. E., & Corso, P. (2002). The effectiveness of interventions to increase physical activity: A systematic review. American journal of preventive medicine, 22, (4), 73-107.

Paterson, B.L., Thorne, S., Canam, C., Jilings, C., (2001). Meta-Study of Qualitative Health Research: A Practical Guide to Meta-Analysis and Meta-Synthesis. Sage, Thousand Oaks,CA.

Södergren, M. (2013). Lifestyle predictors of healthy ageing in men. Maturitas, 75, 113-117.

Corresponding author email: Lars.Kristen@hh.se