The potential of parkrun to benefit the least active

A new research paper looking at the benefits of walking and running at parkrun focuses on areas of social deprivation, and the potential of parkrun to benefit the least active.

A group of researchers have examined the impact of parkrun on people living in the most socioeconomically deprived areas of the UK and those who reported being inactive when registering for parkrun. The findings will shortly be published in a peer reviewed paper. In the meantime, the preprint has been published here.

The research draws on the outcomes of the Health and Wellbeing Survey carried out across the UK in 2018. This survey asked questions on happiness, life satisfaction, mental wellbeing, health, physical activity, motives for taking part in parkrun, and perceived impact of parkrun.

In this specific piece of work, the researchers were interested in people who lived in the most socioeconomically deprived areas and those who reported being inactive at parkrun registration because, often, these people have the most to gain from being more active.

60,000 people completed the Health and Wellbeing Survey. Those who were inactive at registration and from socioeconomically deprived areas reported lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction and poorer health than the full sample. This demonstrates what is called ‘health inequalities’ – unfair differences in health between groups of the population because of the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.

However, encouragingly the vast majority were found to have increased their level of physical activity since participating in parkrun and over half reported improvements to overall health behaviours.

The findings indicate the potential of parkrun to benefit the least active people living in the most socioeconomically deprived areas – making it a potentially useful public health intervention to tackle health inequalities.

Further work is needed to understand how to engage with more people who are the least active and from the most deprived areas to maximise the public health impact.

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