EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF CLIENT-SET VERSUS COACH-SET GOALS IN THE CONTEXT OF A HEALTH-COACHING INTERVENTION FOR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

Health coaching is a relatively new integrated health role in which practitioners use a combination of behavioral interventions to evoke health-related behavior changes; however, there is a lack of valid evidence to support health-based claims. We investigated the effect of an approximation of a health coaching intervention on three college students\u27 number of steps per day. We provided participants with weekly telehealth coaching sessions focused on goal-setting and feedback and used Fitbits to track the results. We used a multiple baseline across participants design to compare daily steps across four phases; self-monitoring, self-monitoring with experimenter-set goals and feedback, self-monitoring with participant-set goals and feedback, and finally, a choice phase in which participants could continue to set their own goals or have the experimenter set goals for them. All experimenter-set goals were selected using a weekly percentile schedule. In aggregate, all participants took more steps in the goal-setting phases than during the self-monitoring only phase. However, there was no notable difference between self-set goals and experimenter-set goals. When offered, all participants chose to continue the intervention for an additional one to two weeks