Citation

Holliday KM, Howard AG, Emch M, Rodriguez DA, Evenson KR. Health Place 2017; 45: 181-188.

Affiliation

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Epidemiology, 137 East Franklin Street Suite 306, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA. Electronic address: kelly_evenson@unc.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.healthplace.2017.03.013

PMID

28391129

Abstract

Residential buffers are frequently used to assess built environment characteristics relevant to physical activity (PA), yet little is known about how well they represent the spatial areas in which individuals undertake PA. We used System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities data for 217 adults from five US states who wore an accelerometer and a GPS for three weeks to create newly defined PA-specific activity spaces. These PA spaces were based on PA occurring in bouts of ≥10min and were defined as 1) the single minimum convex polygon (MCP) containing all of a participant's PA bout minutes and 2) the combination of many MCPs constructed using each PA bout independently. Participants spent a large proportion of their PA bout time outside of 0.5, 1, and 5 mile residential buffers, and these residential buffers were a poor approximation of the spatial areas in which PA bouts occurred. The newly proposed GPS-based PA spaces can be used in future studies in place of the more general concept of activity space to better approximate built environments experienced during PA.

Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Accelerometry; Activity space; Global positioning systems; Physical activity; Residential buffers