Maher has demonstrated that momentary motivational states within someone’s day predict their physical activity behaviors better than their overall levels of motivation.
She was also the first to prove that a tool used by kinesiologists to study youth and adults – called ecological momentary assessment – works with older adults in general and with older adults from vulnerable and understudied populations.
“Using smartphone prompts multiple times per day, we are able to obtain-in-the-moment information about people’s physical activity, their motivation to be active, or how the place they are in and the people they are with are influencing their decisions to be active. We found that this method is feasible with older adults from a wide range of backgrounds. And also, they are providing valid information in their responses on the smartphone that match the physical monitors they are wearing.”
Maher, who has been funded by the NIH and American College of Sports Medicine, doesn’t work alone. In eight years at UNCG, she has mentored 9 graduate students and more than 50 undergraduate students in her lab.
“The thing that I enjoy most about mentoring is that I meet so many talented students, and I get to help them appreciate their full potential and all the things they’re capable of doing.
“It’s always very impressive to me, when I challenge them to develop a research question or design a study to answer that question, to watch them rise to the chall enge. Then I say, ‘Okay, we have the data, now let’s run the analyses and write up the results.’
“To see students grow in that process is really rewarding.”
