Preferences of women in difficult life situations for a physical activity programme: protocol of a discrete choice experiment in the German NU-BIG project

Introduction The BIG project ('Bewegung als Investition in die Gesundheit', ie, 'Movement as Investment in Health') was developed in 2005 as a community-based participatory research programme to offer accessible opportunities for physical activity to women in difficult life situations. Since then, the programme has been expanded to eight sites in Germany. A systematic evaluation of BIG is currently being conducted. As part of this effort, we strive to understand the preferences of participating women for different aspects of the programme, and to analyse their willingness to pay. Methods and analysis In this protocol, we describe the development and analysis plan of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to investigate participants' preferences for a physical activity programme for women in difficult life situations. The experiment will be embedded in a questionnaire covering several aspects of participation in the programme (eg, reach, efficacy and further effects) and the socioeconomic characteristics of all active participants. After a thorough search of the literature, BIG documents review and expert interviews, we identified five important attributes of the programme: course times, travel time to the course venue, additional social activities organised by BIG, consideration of wishes and interests for the further planning of courses and costs per course unit. Thereafter, we piloted the experiment with a sample of participants from the target group. After data collection, the experiment will be analysed using a conditional logit model and a latent class analysis to assess eventual heterogeneity in preferences. Ethics and dissemination Understanding women's preferences will provide useful insights for the further development of the programme and ultimately increase participation and retention. The questionnaire, the included DCE and the pretest on participants received ethical approval (application no. 20-247-1-B). We plan to disseminate the results of the DCE in peer-reviewed journals, national conferences and among participants and programme coordinators and organisers.