Qualidade das informações postadas no Instagram por influencers brasileiros em atividade física

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the quality of information about physical activity posted on social media most used by physically active individuals who exercise outdoors. However, given the exploratory nature of the research, it was divided into 2 phases. Initially, 463 individuals of both sexes were asked to fill out a questionnaire whose questions were linked to: sociodemographic profile, level of physical activity, main objectives and search for information about the practice. The collections started in person, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they migrated to the online scenario. The participating individuals were initially approached in public spaces in the city of Juiz de Fora - MG, whose physical activity was performed outdoors. Subsequently, due to the spraying of online questionnaires, the final sample included residents from several Brazilian states. The descriptive results of the first phase showed that of the 418 physically active individuals who exercise outdoors, 16.2% indicated that they exercised on their own, 22.9 seek information on social media, with Instagram being the most cited and only 33 .8% reported looking for professionals (89% physical education teachers) to obtain information about physical activity. Subsequently, phase 2 of the study was carried out, which consisted of a qualitative analysis of the information posted by the influencers on instagram Brazilian physical activity most cited by the participants. The objective was to carry out a qualitative exploratory analysis of the content produced by these Brazilian influencers. To verify the normality of the data, the Shapiro-Wilk test was used. The Kruskal-Wallis test or one-way analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) was conducted to verify possible differences between groups for quality of posts, engagement, number of followers, likes and comments. In addition, Spearman's correlation test was performed to verify the correlation coefficient between the study variables. Data were tabulated and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistical Software (Version 23.0, IBM Corporation, New York, United States) and the significance level adopted was p ≤ 0.05. The results showed that influencers with less popularity, micro and medioinfluencers, in addition to publishing more informative content about the practice of physical activity, present higher quality criteria regarding the information posted. Furthermore, it was found that 11 influencers with greater popularity have a lower correlation with quality criteria associated with informative posts on physical activity practice (r=-0.353; p<0.05). In conclusion, physically active individuals who exercise outdoors, in addition to seeking information about physical activity with professionals, also use social media, especially Instagram for this purpose. Additionally, micro and medioinfluencers are the categories of influencers in physical activity that publish the most informative posts about physical activity and with the highest number of quality criteria. On the other hand, the informative posts of the macro and megainfluencers categories have low quality as information posted on Instagram.