Children's physical activity and active travel : a cross-sectional study of activity spaces, sociodemographic and neighborhood associations

Measures of individual mobility, such as activity space, have been previously used to help improve our understanding of individuals’ interactions with their everyday environments. However, such methods have rarely been adopted in studying children's physical activity and active travel behavior. In this study, we use a combination of participatory mapping and accelerometer data collected from children aged 8–13 years living in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to describe children's travel behavior and explore associations of active travel, physical activity, and socio-demographic characteristics with environmental attributes. The results from this study reveal complex associations between these different layers. Density of cycling routes was consistently associated with higher levels of physical activity captured via moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), prevalence of active travel, and total activity space exposure. Nevertheless, population density, greenspace, and land-use mix revealed varying associations across different activity behaviors including MVPA, number of steps, and prevalence of active travel. The results from this study not only reassert the complexity of person–environment relationships, but also highlight the potential impacts of measurement and analytical methods on the study results. The novel combination of participatory mapping and accelerometer data together with activity space analysis provided new analytical insights which we discuss in this paper. This study concludes by reporting its observations and envisioning future research directions.

Description

| openaire: EC/H2020/856602/EU//FINEST TWINS Funding Information: KH is supported by Academy of Finland as part of PLANhealth Project (13297753). KH would also like to acknowledge FinEst (H2020 grant 856602) for supporting this study. SM was supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellowship (#1121035) and a University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences Research Fellowship. EI is supported by the Medical Research Council [MC_UU_12015/7, MC_UU_00006/5]. MS is supported by a Health Research Council of New Zealand Sir Charles Hercus Research Fellowship (Grant number 17/013). Neighbourhoods for Active Kids was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand (grant number 14/436). Authors would like to acknowledge prof. Marketta Kyttä her contribution to this research. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

activity space, children, physical activity, physical environment, PPGIS

DOI

10.1080/14733285.2022.2039901

Citation

Hasanzadeh , K , Ikeda , E , Mavoa , S & Smith , M 2023 , ' Children's physical activity and active travel : a cross-sectional study of activity spaces, sociodemographic and neighborhood associations ' , Children's Geographies , vol. 21 , no. 2 , pp. 287-305 . https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2022.2039901

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202203032095

Collections

[article-cris] Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu / ENG

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