Review and special articleNeighborhood Environment and Physical Activity Among Youth: A Review
Section snippets
Context
Physical activity offers numerous health benefits to young people.1 It is recommended that youth participate in moderate to vigorous physical activity for at least 60 minutes daily.2 Recent accelerometer data2, 3 indicated, however, that only 42% of children and 8% of adolescents in the U.S. met this guideline.
Ecologic models postulate multiple environmental influences on physical activity.4 Growing literature from public health, transportation, urban planning, and leisure studies5, 6, 7 has
Data Sources
The present review used the Active Living Research (ALR) literature database, a publicly accessible online database that codes study characteristics and results of published papers on the relationship between built and social environment variables and physical activity, obesity, and sedentary behavior. The database can be accessed at www.activelivingresearch.org/litdb.
Since 2002, researchers at ALR have conducted semi-annual literature searches through PubMed, Web of Science, and SPORTDiscus,
General Characteristics of Papers Reviewed
A total of 103 papers were reviewed. Most studies were cross-sectional and conducted in North America (five in Canada, 68 in the U.S.). There has been a dramatic growth in the number of papers in the last few years, with 86% of papers published between 2005 and 2009. Sample sizes ranged from 52 to 68,288, with a median of 781. There were more studies of children than adolescents. A large majority of papers used only reported measures for neighborhood environment and for physical activity. For
Discussion
This review extracted 1721 results from 103 papers. A key finding was that mode of measurement influenced observed associations between neighborhood environment and youth physical activity (Table 7). Objectively measured environmental attributes were much more consistently related to physical activity. This pattern may be explained by less measurement error in objective measures. In contrast, reported physical activity was much more consistently related to neighborhood environment than was
Conclusion
The best use of the present review may be to identify the neighborhood environmental attributes that are most strongly supported, because such findings can inform environment and policy change priorities being pursued for chronic disease prevention. More confidence can be placed in studies in which environmental variables were measured objectively. The most supported correlates for children were traffic speed/volume, access/proximity to recreation facilities, mixed land use, residential
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