RESEARCH
Participant Preferences for the Development of a Digitally Delivered Gardening Intervention to Improve Diet, Physical Activity, and Cardiovascular Health: Cross-sectional Study
Summary
This study explored what people interested in learning online would want in a digital gardening program designed to improve their diet, physical activity, and heart health. The researchers used an online survey through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to ask 465 adults in the US about their interest in gardening, their preferred ways of learning (like videos or lectures), and what topics they’d want to learn about. To make sure they got thoughtful responses, the researchers had a screening process to exclude people who weren’t paying attention, didn’t understand English well, or might be computer programs (bots). The survey included questions for both people who had gardened before (ever gardeners or EG) and those who had never gardened (never gardeners or NG) to see if their opinions differed.
The survey asked participants about their interest in different types of gardening programs (like weekly expert lectures, short videos, or in-person meetings) and which they found most interesting. They also asked open-ended questions about what they would want to see in a gardening program, what a new gardener would need to know to start, and what kinds of information sources would be most helpful. The researchers then analyzed these responses, comparing the answers of the never gardeners and ever gardeners, and categorized the suggestions into different intervention functions based on a behavior change model.
