Media, Sports and Lifestyles of teenagers. A case study in Italy.

In the last decade, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched an alarm relating to a number of risk factors that can have a negative impact on the life of a human being. Many of them, including a sedentary lifestyle, improper eating habits, as well as the use of smoking, drugs and alcohol, affect not only adults, but particularly young people, in an even more worrying and significant way. Therefore, intervention is needed to improve the health of people by changing their lifestyles. This research, conducted on behalf of CONI Abruzzo in 2012, investigated lifestyles, eating disorders and exercise habits, with particular attention to the profiles of the obese and the severely underweight, which together account for almost a third of the regional population of youth. The study represents a first step in the knowledge base on which to start prevention and raise awareness, with the help of the Federations and and Sports Clubs. The results reported are fully in line with national data (Istat 2010), enabling a detailed picture of the condition and habits of the young people under investigation. During the study, they expressed their views on what information they would like to receive to understand how to follow a healthy lifestyle. The research involved about 10,000 secondary school pupils (equivalent to 20% of the entire school population of the region), distributed in proportion to the type of school attended, gender, age, province of residence, to guarantee the representativeness of the sample. By administering a semi-structured questionnaire and the construction of four focus groups (one in each province of the region), motivation, socio-cultural context, lifestyles and eating habits, practice of the individual sports, relationship dynamics and habits of cultural consumption, were assessed.