History of measuring the food and physical activity environment
Measuring Physical Activity Environments: A Brief History

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Abstract

Physical activity is usually done in specific types of places, referred to as physical activity environments. These often include parks, trails, fitness centers, schools, and streets. In recent years, scientific interest has increased notably in measuring physical activity environments. The present paper provides an historical overview of the contributions of the health, planning, and leisure studies fields to the development of contemporary measures. The emphasis is on attributes of the built environment that can be affected by policies to contribute to the promotion of physical activity. Researchers from health fields assessed a wide variety of built environment variables expected to be related to recreational physical activity. Settings of interest were schools, workplaces, and recreation facilities, and most early measures used direct observation methods with demonstrated inter-observer reliability. Investigators from the city planning field evaluated aspects of community design expected to be related to people's ability to walk from homes to destinations. GIS was used to assess walkability defined by the 3Ds of residential density, land-use diversity, and pedestrian-oriented designs. Evaluating measures for reliability or validity was rarely done in the planning-related fields. Researchers in the leisure studies and recreation fields studied mainly people's use of leisure time rather than physical characteristics of parks and other recreation facilities. Although few measures of physical activity environments were developed, measures of aesthetic qualities are available. Each of these fields made unique contributions to the contemporary methods used to assess physical activity environments.

Introduction

Human behaviors vary in their dependence on specific places. Physical activity is arguably on the more place-dependent end of the spectrum. Some places are physical activity–friendly by nature or design, such as playgrounds, health clubs, open spaces, stairs, sidewalks, and trails. Other places are designed for sedentary behaviors, such as movie theaters, classrooms, offices, and elevators. Places also can be designed in such a way that physical activity is unsafe or unattractive, such as interstate highways, streets without sidewalks or protected pedestrian crossings, crime-infested parks, and locked stairwells.

Given the close connection between built environments and physical activity, one might expect a long history of incorporating built environmental measures in physical activity research. In fact, very few studies of physical environments and physical activity were conducted until the mid-1990s, at least in health-related fields. The primary reason for this neglect of physical environments was probably reliance by researchers on the dominant models and theories of behavior, which emphasized psychological and social influences on behaviors but did not specifically incorporate physical environmental influences.

Increasing use of ecologic models of behavior in the 1990s by physical activity investigators made it clear that important categories of influences had been neglected. Ecologic models are distinguished by their emphasis on multiple levels of influence on behaviors, including individual (biological, psychological); social/cultural; organizational; community; physical environment; and policy.1 Ecologic models directed investigators to consider physical environment and policy influences, and physical activity–specific ecologic models made it clear that specific physical environmental variables of relevance to physical activity had to be conceptualized and measured before they could be examined in studies.2 Thus, the history of physical environment measures for use in physical activity research is brief.

Section snippets

Purpose and Approach

This paper traces recent historical trends in multiple research fields that provided the foundation for the current state of measurement of physical activity environments, which are places where people are, or can be, physically active. Physical activity environments are a subset of broadly defined physical environments, which encompass built and natural environments. The built environment includes all buildings, spaces, and objects that are created or modified by people. It includes homes,

Settings and Behaviors of Interest

Behavioral researchers in public health, exercise science, psychology, and sociology have been working to explain variation in physical activity and to conduct interventions. Before 2000, the behaviors of interest were almost exclusively recreational physical activity, and the settings studied were mainly parks, trails, open spaces, private recreation facilities, and schools where people could engage in active recreation. Research was usually guided by theories that emphasized psychosocial

Settings and Behaviors of Interest

Travel behavior and urban design researchers from the field of city planning have been studying since at least the 1980s how land use, design of communities, and design of transportation systems are related to travel behavior, with goals of reducing traffic congestion and air-quality impacts of development while enhancing quality of life. Consistent with the profession's responsibility for built environments, planners have developed models and theories of built environments. Of special

Settings and Behaviors of Interest

Leisure studies is a young scientific field that grew out of the parks and recreation profession. Leisure studies has been guided mainly by a social–psychological approach to understanding how people use their leisure time.28 Physical activity is just one category of behaviors in which people can participate in leisure time, with others including socializing and relaxing. Although people's use of parks and other recreation facilities was of substantial interest, relatively little attention was

Comment

Three research traditions have approached physical activity environmental measurement from very different perspectives, and this history has produced a diversity of concepts, methods, and specific measures. Reliable and valid measures were developed using objective methods and self-reports. The early work summarized here provides the foundation for truly transdisciplinary approaches to measurement by teams collaborating across disciplinary boundaries that grew dramatically during the 2000s.

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