Be Together, Run More: Enhancing Group Participation in Fitness Technology
Authors: Liu, Zilong; Wang, Xuequn; Luo, Xin (Robert); Song, Xiaolong; Liu, Na; Zhang, Yuan
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2023)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00779
<jats:p>Individuals are increasingly using novel fitness technologies, such as running applications (apps), to support their workouts. The literature has primarily focused on the use of fitness apps at the individual level (i.e., to improve individuals’ exercise levels) and few studies have investigated the role of fitness apps in facilitating group exercise. Consequently, there is a paucity of information on how to enhance the exercise participation of individuals using fitness apps through the use of groups (i.e., how to entice more individuals to engage in exercise). We selected a running app as the context and focused on a particular feature of this app called “Running Spot,” which facilitates members’ offline group engagement, a topic that has thus far received scant attention in the literature. Drawing on the perspective of psychological distance and relational cohesion theory, we propose that the Running Spot feature facilitating offline group engagement improved group participation in running. To advance this line of research, we utilized a panel dataset of 151 running groups from the running app platform over a period of 38 weeks. The aim was to empirically evaluate the e…