Modeling Frequency and Duration of Out-of-Home Participation in Physical Activity by School-Age Children

Abstract

This paper investigates the frequency and the duration of participation in physical activity by children who go to school in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The study uses data from a 2012 activity-based travel diary survey of 245 students in Grades 6 to 10 in the Dhaka metropolitan area. To explore the trade-offs between factors that affect the frequency of out-of-home physical activity, including the use of active transportation, this study used a zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression model. Additionally, parametric hazard models were estimated to examine the duration of physical activities. The results of the ZIP count model suggest that personal and household characteristics, attributes of the built environment, and time commitments for other mandatory and discretionary activities influence the frequency of participation in physical activity. For example, an increase in the number of children in the household and the presence of sidewalks increased the frequency of out-of home, out-of-school physical activity if everything else was held equal. In contrast, travel time to school, the presence of traffic intersections, and the time commitment for tutoring sessions negatively affected participation in physical activity. In the modeling of the duration of out-of-home physical activity, this study found that a Weibull parametric hazard model outperformed a log logistic model. The duration was influenced by sociodemographic characteristics, spatial context, and escort arrangements. For instance, car ownership and a parental escort increased the duration of physical activity. The paper offers an in-depth behavioral understanding of children's physical activities in a developing country.

Understanding and Modeling the Activity-Travel Behavior of University Commuters at a Large Canadian University

“…A count data modeling approach is appropriate for modeling the trip frequency because it shows the characteristics of a discrete distribution that is nonnegative and has integer values (W. Greene, "Accounting for excess zeros and sample selection in Poisson and negative binomial regression models," Working Paper EC-94-10, Stern School of Business, New York Univ., New York; Jang 2005). The Poisson model has been utilized in several studies for trip frequency modeling because trips occur randomly and independently over time (Bhat et al 1998;Misra 1999;Ma and Goulias 1999;Wallace et al 1999;Jang 2005;Habib and Daisy 2013). However, the Poisson model postulates the equidispersion theorem in which the conditional variance of the dependent variable is equal to the conditional mean.…”

COVID-19: Modeling Out-of-Home and In-Home Activity Participation during the Pandemic

“…Feng et al ( 7 ) investigated the intra-personal and inter-personal interactions of partners/spouses and inter-personal interactions between different generations in elderly co-residence households. Habib and Daisy ( 8 ) investigated the frequency and the duration of participation in physical activity by school-going children. Kizony et al ( 9 ) proposed a model that explains the activity participation of community-dwelling older adults.…”

Simultaneous Estimation of Flexible Models and Associated Hyperparameters: An Application to Travel Activity-Duration Modeling

“…Activity-duration modeling has received a considerable amount of research attention ( 3 , 12 – 19 ). This is because activity-based modeling (ABM) places emphasis on understanding participation characteristics of individuals including the duration spent performing an activity ( 1 ).…”

“…Some studies have investigated the factors that influence durations of activity episodes. For instance, Habib ( 16 ) studied factors affecting out-of-home physical activities by children in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Car ownership, tenure type, activity location, and parent-escort arrangements were found to be the most notable predictors of the duration of physical activity.…”