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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Physical Education and Pedagogy
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1393336
This article is part of the Research Topic Schools as an arena for health-promoting physical activity View all articles

"A constant battle against sedentary lifestyle and screen time": Swedish school nurses' views on school children's physical activity and its promotion -a grounded theory study

Provisionally accepted
Emelie Wiklund Emelie Wiklund 1,2*Maria Wiklund Maria Wiklund 3,4Jenny Vikman Jenny Vikman 2Susanna Hedenborg Susanna Hedenborg 2
  • 1 Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
  • 2 Department of Sports Science, Faculty of Learning and Society, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
  • 3 Umeå University, Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden
  • 4 Other, Umeå, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    School nurses are in a key position to promote children's physical activity. They engage all children in health dialogues and use different approaches to inform children about physical activity and motivate them to change their physical activity level. In a school context, it is important to explore and problematize school nurses' views of children's physical activity and the influence of these views on their professional practice in the school health service.Identifying and problematizing school nurses' views of physical activity would enable them to create improved guidelines and equivalent ways of working in the future. Therefore, this study aims to discursively explore Swedish school nurses' views on school children's physical activity and its promotion and elucidate them through a discursive framework based on sensitizing concepts. This study uses a qualitative research design with a constructivist grounded theory approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 school nurses.The analysis resulted in a core category describing how school nurses use intertwined views to lead children from sedentarity to physical activity. Furthermore, the school nurses' practices were identified in three categories: fostering everyday movement as a tool for health, battling children's sedentarity under difficult conditions, and promoting everyday movement and compensating for unequal access. The results indicate that school nurses lack common and clear guidelines for their mission to promote physical activity to children, which may lead to inequality in access to physical activity for children and young people.

    Keywords: Children, Health Promotion, physical activity, School, School nurses, sedentary behavior

    Received: 28 Feb 2024; Accepted: 04 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wiklund, Wiklund, Vikman and Hedenborg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Emelie Wiklund, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.