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].