Promoting physical activity: fertile ground for rehabilitation psychology

Comments on the article by Schmacher et al. (see record 2013-06066-009). Readers of Rehabilitation Psychology might be surprised, or maybe even alarmed, to find an article on promoting physical activity in able-bodied people between the covers of their latest issue. This commentary contends that this area of research and practice might be one into which rehabilitation psychologists want to venture. Schumacher and coworkers describe a field test (N = 216) of a token system for reinforcing stair taking. The setting was an eight-story office building housing a single company in a midsized city in the southeastern United States. Schumacher et al. report an increase from 39 stair transactions per day by all study participants in the 6 months before implementation of the intervention to 301 transactions in the 6 months after the implementation of the intervention, which represents a 600% increase. The cost of the intervention was only $17 per person. Although replication of these results in a study with additional sources of control would increase confidence in the validity of the findings, the size of the gains in stair taking, the number of participants in the study, the length of the baseline and implementation periods, and the objective measurement of outcome warrant attention.