Awareness of Move campaign
Creators: name: Harpaz, Aaron
name: Hayer, Arsh
name: Carino, EJ
name: Aiken, Koji
name: Wirz, Philip
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2020

description: Regular physical activity plays a strong role in various aspects of health and wellbeing in both students and teachers. UBC is a university that is fortunate enough to have an initiative called MoveUBC put in place to help improve the health of everyone on campus. Through regular events and an extension called the MoveUCrew, this initiative can promote health in fitness across all students, faculty, and departments. After reviewing current literature, we realized that there may be a lack of participation by teachers and faculty across events held on campus. This is what pushed us to further investigate the reasons behind this trend. We decided to start on a smaller scale and began our research investigating the School of Kinesiology. We chose to do so because this department is known to be the health and fitness promoter and wanted to know their reasons for a lack of participation. To begin, we formulated a survey that would allow us to evaluate their views of the initiative along with measuring the number of interactions occurring between the School of Kinesiology and MoveUBC to understand why a disconnect is present. We sent out surveys to 35 members of the department and received 22 fully completed surveys in return. After compiling the results, it became apparent that most survey responders were aware of MoveUBC but were unaware of the actual mission statement and goals that this initiative is striving towards. Another important finding discovered was that for the most part, faculty members did not wish to have groups such as MoveUCrew come into their classrooms for a few minutes to give their students a movement break. There was also a lack of interest among most of the survey members regarding participation in such events mainly due to a lack of time. When analyzing our findings, we were able to create some recommendations for our partner MoveUBC. Our recommendations include having this initiative connect with the School of Kinesiology to better inform their staff and faculty of the events and resources available presented by MoveUBC. Our second recommendation is ensuring that these events are scheduled around the schedules of faculty allowing them with the opportunity to participate. The third recommendation is creating incentives to motivate faculty to come out to events. Lastly, our final recommendation would be focusing on integrating themselves into the planning of the School of Kinesiology events such as the Kinesiology Undergraduate Societies annual career fair. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”