Looking for more than weight loss and fitness gain: Psychosocial dimensions among elder women in a primary-care exercise-referral program

There has beer increasing interest in promoting health-enhancing exercise i n primary-care services. One popular approach in the U.K. has been general practitioner (GP) exercise-referral plans in which mostly sedentary patient s are referred by GPs to an exercise program at a local leisure center. It is not clear, however, how older women assimilate such a referral system in to cognitive processes associated with physical activity involvement. This interpretivist study adopted unstructured interviewing and life-story techn ique to embrace subjectivity and contextuality in an attempt to capture the complex processes and to explore both common and diverse experience. The s tudy explored referred older women's accounts of their past and current exp eriences of physical activity and their perceptions of what blocks or motiv ates them to be active. Fifteen newly referred older women (50-80 years old ) were interviewed at various points during their prescribed 10-week exerci se program. The findings highlight the importance of psychosocial dimension s and informal networks in the: referral processes.