Interactions between psychosocial and built environment factors in explaining older adults' physical activity
Highlights
► Built environment and psychosocial factors interact in influencing physical activity. ► Older adults are the least active age group. ► Environment and psychosocial factors together generally influenced activity the most. ► Interventions to increase activity should focus on both levels of factors.
Section snippets
Design
The present analyses used data from the Senior Neighborhood Quality of Life Study (SNQLS) that was conducted in the Baltimore, Maryland-Washington, DC and Seattle-King County, Washington regions during 2005–2008 (King et al., 2011). The primary aim of SNQLS was to investigate the relationship between built environment factors and physical activity in older adults. Census block groups (n = 216) were chosen to represent high and low walkability based on an index using parcel and street network data
Results
Participant demographic characteristics are presented in Table 1 and descriptive statistics of independent variables are presented in Table 2. Final sample size ranged from 687 to 709 due to missing data. Participants engaged in an average of 93.6 min/week of total MVPA, 40.9 min/week of walking for transportation, and 99.5 min/week of walking for leisure (see Table 3). Table 4 shows the relation of the environmental and psychosocial variables to min/week of physical activity.
Discussion
The present study provided some support for ecological model-predicted interactions between built environment and psychosocial factors in explaining physical activity among older adults. Six significant interactions were found (p < 0.05) and an additional 5 interaction terms displayed a trend for significance (p < 0.10) across the three physical activity metrics examined. For 5 of the 6 significant interactions, physical activity minutes were greater when both psychosocial and environmental factors
Conclusions
Experience with multilevel community interventions is accumulating (Bors et al., 2009), but evaluations have not been sufficient to understand their effects (Samuels et al., 2010). The present findings, if suitably replicated, imply that multilevel interventions that change both psychosocial and environmental variables may be most effective in increasing physical activity. The results also suggest considerable utility can be gained by targeting populations that rank high on one but not the
Conflict of interest
The authors do not have conflicts of interest to declare.
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