Playability: Built and Social Environment Features That Promote Physical Activity Within Children

Abstract

The role of neighbourhood built and social environments in shaping children's physical activity has received increasing interest over the past 10 years. We reviewed recent evidence published between 2011 and 2014. Most of the recent evidence continues to be cross-sectional. Few macro-level neighbourhood attributes were consistently associated with physical activity in the expected direction. The strongest evidence for associations between neighbourhood attributes and physical activity with was for the transportation environment, particularly in relation to proximity to school and transport-related physical activity. There was intermediate evidence that neighbourhood walking/cycling infrastructure and pedestrian safety structures are associated with transport-related PA. Recent evidence on associations between the neighbourhood built and social environment and children's PA is modest. Stronger study designs and greater attention to conceptual-matching and specificity of measures are critical to advance the evidence base.

Two‐Year Changes in Child Weight Status, Diet, and Activity by Neighborhood Nutrition and Physical Activity Environment

“…Unexpectedly, one of the neighborhood types (low PAE / high NE neighborhoods) with less-supportive environments for physical activity had children with the smallest declines in physical activity over time. However, recent reviews suggest that macro-environmental factors that contribute to walkability and to used define a more supportive physical activity environment in the present study (e.g., greater land use mix) are not consistently or highly related to children’s overall physical activity and have in some instanced been related to lower physical activity among younger children [27]. Other aspects of the built environment or parental travel and activity patterns may influence children’s physical activity changes over time.…”

Active living

“…PATRns were positively associated with a larger number of days travelling to school of the child by means of active transportation, and in addition moderated the association between environmental factors and AST. For children raised in families in which the parents use active transportation frequently (high-PATRns), distance between home and school, though generally indicated as the most important determinant of AST (Larouche, 2015;Timperio et al, 2015), was a substantially weaker barrier to AST than for children raised in low-PATRns families. For children living in high-PATRns families living close to school, distance to school was not found to be a barrier to AST, whereas distance was still a barrier for children raised in low-PATRns families.…”

“…This is particularly relevant in studies focusing on environmental interventions as it is necessary to know whether someone is actually exposed to the intervened environment. Behavior-specific contextual information is an important step forward towards gaining more insight into the relationship between environment and PA (Timperio et al, 2015).…”

“…By a non-comprehensive operationalization of the dual-process view (Kremers et al, 2006) in the work for this thesis, an accurate interpretation of which pathways are followed as a result of environmental changes is impossible. Testing the mediating pathway though would enhance our understanding of the mechanism by which the environment influences the PA behavior in children (Timperio et al, 2015;Van Sluijs et al, 2011;Van Stralen et al, 2011). Depending on the scope of future studies, comprehensively studying the dual-process view as presented in the EnRG-framework might be considered.…”

“…An example of domain-specificity relates to children's school schedule, which largely limits their spatial freedom-and thus environmental exposure during weekdays. Separately investigating after-school PA (ASPA) helps to increase our understanding children's context-specific PA and its environmental attributes (Bauman et al, 2012;Ding & Gebel, 2012;Giles-Corti et al, 2005;Stanley, Ridley, & Dollman, 2012;Timperio, Reid, & Veitch, 2015). Studies using subjective measures of ASPA generally reported that boys seemed to be more active after school than girls (Leslie, Kremer, Toumbourou, & Williams, 2010;Pate et al, 1997) and suggested a negative influence of technology-related sedentary activities on ASPA (Atkin, Gorely, Biddle, Marshall, & Cameron, 2008;Pate et al, 1997).…”