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Physical activity and obesity
What they say and what they do: comparing physical activity across the USA, England and the Netherlands
  1. Arie Kapteyn1,
  2. James Banks2,
  3. Mark Hamer3,
  4. James P Smith4,
  5. Andrew Steptoe5,
  6. Arthur van Soest6,
  7. Annemarie Koster7,
  8. Saw Htay Wah1
  1. 1 Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA
  2. 2 University of Manchester and Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, UK
  3. 3 School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
  4. 4 RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, USA
  5. 5 Department of Epidemiology, University College London, London, UK
  6. 6 Department of Econometrics, Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands
  7. 7 Department of Social Medicine, CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Limburg, the Netherlands
  1. Correspondence to Professor Arie Kapteyn, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 9007, USA; kapteyn{at}usc.edu

Abstract

Background Physical activity (PA) is important for maintaining health, but there are fundamental unanswered questions on how best it should be measured.

Methods We measured PA in the Netherlands (n=748), the USA (n=540) and England (n=254), both by a 7 day wrist-worn accelerometer and by self-reports. The self-reports included a global self-report on PA and a report on the frequency of vigorous, moderate and mild activity.

Results The self-reported data showed only minor differences across countries and across groups within countries (such as different age groups or working vs non-working respondents). The accelerometer data, however, showed large differences; the Dutch and English appeared to be much more physically active than Americans h (For instance, among respondents aged 50 years or older 38% of Americans are in the lowest activity quintile of the Dutch distribution). In addition, accelerometer data showed a sharp decline of PA with age, while no such pattern was observed in self-reports. The differences between objective measures and self-reports occurred for both types of self-reports.

Conclusion It is clear that self-reports and objective measures tell vastly different stories, suggesting that across countries people use different response scales when answering questions about how physically active they are.

  • physical activity
  • accelerometer
  • self-report

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2017-209703

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors AK, JB, MH, JPS and AS conceived the study and drafted the paper. SHW and AK carried out the statistical analysis, had full access to the data and take responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the results. All authors contributed intellectually to refine the study design and to the critical revision of the manuscript.

    • Funding This research was funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging including R-37AG25529 to JPS at Rand and R01AG20717 to AK at USC. Funding for ELSA was provided by the National Institute of Aging (R01AG017644) and a consortium of UK government departments coordinated by the Economic and Social Research Council.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval Ethical approval was gained from the respective ethics committees of each study (ELSA, LISS, UAS).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement ELSA data are publicly available from http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/.

    • Press Release We are planning a press release through USC