Determining Adolescents’ Needs for Culturally Appropriate Exercises (DANCE): Lessons Learned and Practical Implications from a Pilot Study

This article illustrates the iterative process of designing a tailored physical activity intervention for adolescents from minoritized racial/ethnic groups (n = 35, 12.6 ± 0.7 years) in a socioeconomically challenged urban school. The authors describe the intervention, namely, an after-school dance program, and explain how lessons learned from the initial program were then applied to a subsequent program one year later. Immediately following the year-two intervention, daily moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) levels of participants were significantly higher (19.4 ± 10.2 min) when compared to their MVPA levels prior to the intervention (11.3 ± 3.8 min), p = .041. This study demonstrates how a participant tailored MVPA intervention can favorably impact MVPA among adolescents from minoritized racial/ethnic groups attending an economically disadvantaged urban school. Although average daily MVPA improved following the intervention, it is still below the 60 minutes per day MVPA recommendation. Future interventions should continue to target increasing MVPA for this age and population.