Table 3.

Summary of overall narrative and relationships of specific points to overarching themes

Themes
Conceptual points for discussion	1. Conceptualisations of physical activity	2. Environmental interventions as changes in structure	3. Context may alter the success of an intervention	4. Mechanisms may be observable or unobservable	5. Understanding interventions as events in complex systems
Physical activity means different things to different disciplines…
movements (exercise physiology)	✓
types of activity (behaviours)	✓
a collection of activities (practices)	✓
Influences on physical activity are viewed differently in different disciplines…
social influences (psychology) cf. socially embedded (anthropology, practices)	✓	✓		✓	✓
physical influences (could be as a context)			✓
Physical activity behaviour and its influences are complex and inter-related	✓
Definition of the environment includes attributes of the social and physical environment		✓		✓	✓
Interactions between people and environment…
people as agents		✓
environments as structural constraint		✓
Effectiveness of interventions differs…
and could be altered by social or physical environments			✓
or trigger different processes				✓
Methods for assessing mechanisms differ…
Observable and measurable: quantitative methods (mediation or moderation) or qualitative methods				✓	✓
Unobservable and unmeasurable: qualitative methods				✓	✓
Important to acknowledge that ..
feedback loops or reciprocal pathways (interactions between people and structure) operate		✓		✓	✓
long causal pathways are non-linear		✓		✓	✓