U.S. Physical Activity Para Report Card for Children and Adolescents With Disabilities

Abstract

The U.S. Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth has tracked 10 physical activity (PA) indicators common to the Active Healthy Kids Global Matrix since 2014. This article expands on the U.S. report cards by presenting PA indicator assessments among children and adolescents with disabilities. Grades for indicators were assigned based on a search of peer-reviewed articles presenting nationally representative data. The Global Matrix 3.0 benchmarks and grading framework guided the process. Grades for overall PA, sedentary behaviors, organized sports, and school were F, D+, D+, and D, respectively. Insufficient evidence existed to assign grades to the remaining six indicators. There is a need in the United States for targeted PA promotion strategies that are specific to children and adolescents with disabilities. Without a commitment to this effort across sectors and settings, the low grades identified in this para report card are expected to remain.

“WOT” Do We Know and Do About Physical Activity of Children and Adolescents With Disabilities? A SWOT-Oriented Synthesis of Para Report Cards

“…Local teams that participated in the Para Report Cards within this special issue were asked to include interpretations related to their report cards' grades, and it was recommended to use a SWOT analysis framework. Specifically, submitted manuscripts from Brazil (Silva & da Silva, 2022), Canada (Arbour-Nicitopoulos et al, 2022), Finland (Asunta et al, 2022), France (Aubert, Verdot, et al, 2022), Hong Kong (Sit, Huang, et al, 2022), Ireland (Ng, Healy, et al, 2022), Israel (Hutzler et al, 2022), Lithuania (Pozeriene et al, in press), South Korea (Lee et al, 2022), Spain (Lo ´pez-Gil et al, in press), and the United States (Stanish et al, 2023) were collated for this synthesis. Documents submitted at the time of auditor review were used for Chile, Philippines (Kang et al, 2022), and Poland.…”

Global Matrix of Para Report Cards on Physical Activity of Children and Adolescents With Disabilities

“…Some data used to assign grades were not disaggregated by disability status as it was assumed that CAWD live in the same neighborhoods as the general population (López-Gil et al, 2023). Some countries opted to grade this indicator as INC when there were insufficient data on accessibility of environments for CAWD to engage in PA (Arbour-Nicitopoulos et al, 2022;Stanish et al, 2023).…”

Physical activity of children and adolescents with disabilities in Poland - First Para Report Card

“…In 2014 AHKGA initiated the Global Matrix (GM) – the initiative which aims in preparing and disseminating comparative report cards on PA of children and adolescents from different countries and regions. In the wake of the third edition of initiative – GM 3.0 in the countries such as Finland, 13 Netherlands, 14 Hong Kong, 15 and USA 16 analysis on PA in CAWD was carried out and reported as separate or integrated report. The results obtained from these reports demonstrate consistent patterns; in the majority of the countries surveyed, there is a notable insufficiency of data required for the assessment of established benchmarks.…”