Workplace Neighborhoods, Walking, Physical Activity, Weight Status, and Perceived Health

Abstract

Recent interest has focused on how the residential neighborhood built environment affects walking and other physical activity. The workplace neighborhood has been examined far less. This paper explores the neighborhood around the workplace in relation to walking, physical activity, body mass index, and perceived health for those who: (a) worked away from home (N=446) and (b) were retired or unemployed (N=207). Study participants from the MinneapolisSt. Paul metropolitan area were recruited from environmentally diverse residential neighborhoods in 2004. They wore an accelerometer, kept a travel diary, and answered a survey. Their workplace neighborhood environments were measured using a geographic information system. In bivariate assessments, many features of the workplace neighborhood environment were significantly, but modestly, correlated with travel walking including density, street pattern, and land use (commercial, office, and residential). Fewer environmental features were correlated with total physical activity, a result confirmed in multivariate analyses. While several workplace neighborhood environmental variables were correlated with total walking, relevant to the field of transportation, the pattern of association with total physical activity was not as consistent or strong. Since many spend considerable time at work, more research is clearly needed on this topic.

Associations Between Worksite Walkability, Greenness, and Physical Activity Around Work

“…Using a 1,040 counts per minute cutpoint meant that walking was included within our definition of MVPA, which allowed us to confirm the reported associations obtained using subjective measures of the built environment. Forsyth and Oakes (2014), however, found only weak associations between the work neighborhood built environment and PA outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing the effects of the work neighborhood using both a land use based and a destination-based walkability measure.…”

“…Strategies aimed at increasing PA at the same time need to target multiple levels and settings of the ecologic framework, including the worksite (Hipp et al, 2015). Walkable environments, characterized by density, connectivity, and land use diversity (Forsyth, 2015) can increase the amount of active commuting (Frank, Bradley, Kavage, Chapman, & Lawton, 2008), as well as short active trips taken throughout the working day (Forsyth & Oakes, 2014; Gehrke & Welch, 2017). At the same time, working in a natural and aesthetically pleasing environment can foster going out for a walk in the middle of the day, or encourage walking meetings.…”

“…Specifically, there is a need to analyze how the work environment contributes to PA gained in the work domain, either inside the workplace or in its vicinities. With notable exceptions reported by Troped, Wilson, Matthews, Cromley, and Melly (2010) and Forsyth and Oakes (2014), previous research has used either subjective measures of built environment or self-reported PA (Yang et al, 2014). Relying exclusively on subjective or self-reported measures may result in intended or unintended bias.…”

“…Adams et al (2016) found self-reported perceptions of the built environment around work to be positively correlated with commuter walking in a study set in the United Kingdom. In the U.S. context, Adlakha et al (2015) found factors such as the presence of bike facilities, interesting things to look at, and crime rates to significantly predict workplace PA, while Forsyth and Oakes (2014) found the attributes of the built environment around work to be associated with walking for transport but not for total PA. Finally, and also in the United States, Schwartz et al (2009) reported a lack of significant associations between perceived attributes of the built environment around work and average weekday steps measured by accelerometer.…”

International comparison of observation-specific spatial buffers: maximizing the ability to estimate physical activity

“…More recently, the ‘sausage’ buffering method (also referred to as ‘line-based’ buffers) has been used by researchers as an alternate network-based buffering method [28–30]. The sausage buffering technique selects roads within a given distance of the participant, and creates a crow-fly buffer around the roads by a set distance (e.g.…”