Interventions or Programs
The more frequent type of health behaviours addressed in each individual
study were PA and nutrition, in 13 and seven studies respectively (see
Table 2). Other health behaviours studied included smoking (n=2) [22,
24], alcohol consumption (n=1) [24], sun protection (n=1)
[22], health accountability (n=1) [28] and self-examination
(n=1) [22]. More than half of the studies focused on one specific
health behaviour, whereas the others addressed multiple health
behaviours. Furthermore, studies evaluated a combination of modalities
including educational interventions (n=11) [21-24, 26, 28-30,
32-34], individualized or group PA interventions (n=6) [21, 25, 27,
30-32], counselling (n=5), psychosocial support or training (n=6)
[22, 23, 25, 27, 33, 34], reward system (i.e. healthy goods and
services) (n=2) [24, 31] and adventure-based activities (n=1)
[26]. Programs included between 2 and 3 different modalities.
Five studies were conducted in a hospital or clinic [22, 23, 25, 27,
28], four were delivered using various technologies (i.e. emails, text
messages, online platforms) or telephone [24, 29, 33, 34], two were
home-based [30, 32] and three were community-based [21, 26, 31].
The majority of programs or interventions were developed using a
theoretical framework, the most popular being Bandura’s social cognitive
theory [35] used in seven studies [23, 28-31, 33, 34]. Only
three studies did not report any theoretical framework [25, 27, 32]
and four integrated elements from multiple frameworks to develop their
interventions [23, 26, 33, 34].