Consumers’ Opinions on Fitness Wearable

Bartosz Kurdziel
Business research methods, Mälardalen University

Research context
For my quantitative research assignment I have selected a public available dataset form the
online platform Kaggle.com created by Harshita Aswani – Fitness Consumer Survey Data. The
study she has conducted in the area of fitness wearables, small wrist devices, which were
designed to help people measure health indicators and manage time during the exercises.
Respondents were asked to answer several questions to gather information about this product,
the behaviours while using it or opinions about its influence over consumers’ fitness experience.
It is important to add at this point that every respondent, who have shared his/her opinions, were
a current user of this described device. I have chosen this dataset also to learn myself – as a
former user of fitness wearable – about that phenomenon and what are the view on it from
perspective of different demographic groups. To be more focused on a particular part of this
potentially vast product perception area of interest, I decided to establish my research question
as it goes – What are the ways in which using Fitness Wearable influence the perception of the
exercises? This research question treated as a tool should help me to delimit my research and
to stay on right direction during the study.
To research deeply in this case I have decided to establish set of two hypotheses I will
be testing further with the help of the quantitative tools. They can be formulated as follows:
1. Using Fitness Wearable influence women to go to the gym or to the fitness
class.
2. Fitness Wearable have a strong impact on the user’s health by evoking
positive emotions.
The first hypothesis is combined with the research question by its aims to check the social
aspect of using the device by deciding to spend exercise time with a group of people. The second
will check whether positive feeling for example joy evoked by using Fitness Wearable during
the exercises influence the people’s perception of their health.
As the author says in details section “the dataset consist of 30 responses from 30
different respondents and 21 questions”. I have change the answers from the short opinions to
numerical scale, for instance Strongly Agree to 5, Agree to 4, Neutral to 3, Disagree to 2,
Strongly Disagree to 1. Such or similar transformation would not be working so smooth with
every question, especially these, which measure frequency in different time periods like int the
case of first construct. For the record I need to mention that however this dataset does not have
established constructs per se in its description on the website, they can be easily withing file as
question focused on specific area standing next to each other. I have dared to give them general
labels – Duration and Frequency (D&F), User Engagement (UE), Health Impact (HI) and
Influence on Behaviour (IoB) – what could be seen in the Appendix 1 at the of this paper. Then
I use Transform function in SPSS to create the new construct variables, by having computed
the average of answers of question withing group.

Data Quality Assessment

Descriptive analysis of the dataset can give a lot of information about the structure of
respondents. It is easy to read from the table below that exactly half of respondents is less than
25 years old. Although the spread is quite vast because of representation even of people 55-64
years old, it is clear that younger groups dominate in this research.

The group representation of frequency in exercises is divided into quite equally. Half of all the
respondents is going to exercise more than two times a week, what can be seen down here:
 The created pie chart below is describing the education level of the responders. In this
case the dataset does not have big differences between people, because huge majority of them
(80%) has the higher education with some degree. That is worth to acknowledge even though
the first view over the pie chart would suggest similar distribution, due to the fact the in the
survey higher education was split to several categories.

The last of described here chart will help to gather information about the mean and
standard deviation. Two question can be seen outstanding because of the very low mean,
however the construction of them in the survey was different due to another scale (1-3). That
was also a reason not to put them into any other computed construct. Behind that there is one
more thing with the question about motivation, where standard deviation is the highest – 0,98.

Descriptive Statistics
Std.
N Minimum Maximum Mean Deviation
Has using a fitness wearable influenced your decision? [To exercise more?] 30 3 5 4,23 ,679
How has the fitness wearable impacted your fitness routine? 26 1 3 2,88 ,431
Has the fitness wearable helped you stay motivated to exercise? 30 1 5 4,27 ,980
Do you think that the fitness wearable has made exercising more enjoyable? 30 2 5 4,17 ,834
How engaged do you feel with your fitness wearable? 30 2 5 3,97 ,928
Does using a fitness wearable make you feel more connected to the fitness 30 3 5 4,10 ,759
community?
How has the fitness wearable helped you achieve your fitness goals? 30 1 3 2,37 ,615
How has the fitness wearable impacted your overall health? 27 3 5 4,33 ,679
Has the fitness wearable improved your sleep patterns? 30 2 5 4,10 ,803
Do you feel that the fitness wearable has improved your overall well-being? 30 2 5 4,17 ,834
Has using a fitness wearable influenced your decision? [To purchase other 30 2 5 3,77 ,817
fitness-related products?]
Has using a fitness wearable influenced your decision? [To join a gym or fitness 30 3 5 4,10 ,712
class?]
Has using a fitness wearable influenced your decision? [To change your diet?] 30 3 5 4,27 ,691
Valid N (listwise) 25

Deeper look to that question by boxplot gives explanation of that by showing its
distribution. There can be seen also one dot at the very bottom, marked by system as outliner.
After controlling of that case I can say that Respondent 14 was not very satisfied with the
product giving sometimes lowers reviews. I will not delete it as outliner, rather permit to stay
as a valuable different opinion, showing bigger picture. The literature (Hair, 2019, p. 87)
describes such cases as interesting outliers highlighting its unique characteristic. Hair et al. add
that researcher should possess “domain knowledge of the context of the analysis to understand
whether these observations add to existing knowledge of the context”.
 In the dataset there was a few cases of missing information in the form of two I prefer
not to say answers in gender category (coded as “999”) and up to seven answers I do not know
along the two questions about impact over health and health routine (coded as “0”). Any other
missing information such as skipped question without any answer has not appeared. Further
searching through the cells did not ended with finding any absurdly large number or any other
outlier. I tried to use an average over the numerical answers withing every responder’s row to
find whether there can be seen a pattern of same answers indicating that is something wrong
with that record. Both this and deeper look have not shown any untrustworthy answer.

Reliability and Validity Assessment

Byrman (2012, pp. 168–172) is pointing out that “there are least the different meaning” of the
reliability term. In this paper I will focus the most on the one of them – the internal reliability,
which refers to a question if “the indicators do not relate to the same thing; in other words, they
lack coherence” (p. 170). For checking the data for having or not internal consistency I will use
a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Value of which stands as follows for three main constructs:
0,830 for User Engagement, 0,835 for Health Impact and 0,762 for BoI. First two cases have
really high value over 0,8 what is a good start. Moreover in both these cases all the factors
within have smaller value of Cronbach’s Alpha if Item Deleted so I go on without changing
these constructs. There is however different thing in the third case. Although indicator is lower
that 0,8 what would be preferable, but it is still considered acceptable, one of the question is
problematic with higher Cronbach’s Alpha if Item Deleted value – 0,779. The question was
“Has using a fitness wearable influenced your decision? [To purchase other fitness-related
products?]” and its Squared Multiple Correlation and was not so hight with only 0,230. As
guide the instruction from SPSS handbook (Pallant, 2016, pp. 117–120), considering both these
indicators, “you may need to consider removing this item from the scale” and I have decided
so. From this point construct Influence on Behaviour holds only three factors.
On the other hand there is a question of validity. To answer this question I needed to
check the corelation between the variables and also to check how does it look like insight the
constructs. I have welcomed the output eagerly, because the table of correlation indicated that
variables have a big correlation insight the groups of concepts, but not with the other variables
outside. All the differences could be seen very easily.
Hypothesis Testing
To test my first hypothesis I have decided to use T-test. F equals 0,003 far lower than 1. P-value
is 0,956, very high above significance level of 0,05, so I cannot reject no hypothesis. There is
no significance difference between gender groups. However I will add that mean from group
statistics for women (4,13) was higher a little than for men (4,08), which of course do not
change t-test results.
To test my second hypothesis I have decided to use linear regression, to check causality. I will
here measure the influence of User Engagement (independent variable) construct over Health
Impact (dependent one), where correlation is 0,475. Model output shows R square equals to
0,191, which is not really high, it means that UE variable explains the HI only in 19%.
Coefficient for UE is 0,41, which means raising UE about one point will cause change in HI
by 0,41 point; that’s the degree of change. The p-value is 0,023, below significance level of
0,05, so the relationship between these variables is medium strong. The model is statistically
significant.

Interpretation and Conclusion

The most important statement that could open the section of conclusions has to be that
fitness wearables have impact over the user experience, what was shown through the analyses
over consumer answers conducted in the main constructs. The tests showed that first hypothesis
has not any evidence in data, so I reject it. I cannot say that women go more eagerly to public
exercise place like gym than men. Moreover, tested hypothesis two can be descripted as proven
by the linear regression model. Being more engage in fitness life affects health in the good way.

References
Harshita Aswani – Fitness Consumer Survey Data – Kaggle Dataset
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/harshitaaswani/fitness-consumer-survey-data/

1. Bryman, A., 2012. Social research methods, 4. ed. ed. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
2. Hair, J.F., 2019. Multivariate data analysis, Eighth edition. ed. Cengage, Andover,
Hampshire.
3. Pallant, J., 2016. SPSS survival manual: a step by step guide to data analysis using IBM
SPSS, 6th edition. ed. McGraw Hill Education, Maidenhead New York.
Appendix 1
Constructs