UNDERSTANDING SPATIAL PATTERNS OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY: MEASUREMENT IMPLICATIONS FOR EPIDEMIOLOGIC RESEARCH
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
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Holliday, Katelyn
- Affiliation: Gillings School of Global Public Health, Department of Epidemiology
- Abstract
- Physical activity (PA) is linked to prevention of a spectrum of chronic diseases, compression of morbidity, and improved quality of life. Yet, most adults do not engage in the recommended amount of PA. Thus, identifying factors that increase PA is an important research focus. Researchers advocate use of theoretical frameworks, which propose that a variety of factors (e.g., environmental, social, and policy) work together to influence health behavior. The built environment is a factor suggested by theoretical frameworks that is of particular interest for PA given its potential as an intervention target at the population level. Due to the complex mechanisms by which built environment factors influence PA, their study has incorporated input from a range of disciplines which, while beneficial, has resulted in inconsistent exposure and outcome definitions, measurement practices, and analytic methods. These differences may contribute to the discrepancies observed in many exposure-outcome relationships and complicate comparison of results across disciplines. The focus of this research was therefore on informing three distinct methodological issues that involve identifying and appropriately measuring attributes of the built environment locations in which PA occurs. First, a PA location coding protocol was developed to increase the quality of published studies on the PA locations of adults and then implemented within a sociodemographically and geographically diverse participant population. Second, examination of the spatial overlap between residential buffers and newly proposed PA spaces was completed to inform interpretation of PA-built environment studies with exposures derived from commonly used residential buffers. Finally, a recommendation for the number of GPS monitoring days needed to reliably estimate minutes of PA in various locations was developed. The substantive and methodological contributions of these three inter-related aims improves the PA locational context literature by facilitating current PA intervention development and urban planning through delineating the locational contexts in which diverse adults choose to be physically active. Further, these results guide future research to improve the methodological soundness of studies examining the locational context of PA. Taken together, these results provide useful information for researchers, health promotion specialists, and urban planners attempting to study and plan environments that support PA.
- Date of publication
- August 2016
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Rosamond, Wayne D.
- Emch, Michael
- Rodriguez, Daniel
- Howard, Annie Green
- Evenson, Kelly
- Degree
- Doctor of Public Health
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2016
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This work has no parents.
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