Personal and environmental correlates of active travel and physical activity in a deprived urban population

International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity BioMed Central Open Access Research Personal and environmental correlates of active travel and physical activity in a deprived urban population David Ogilvie*1,6, Richard Mitchell2, Nanette Mutrie3, Mark Petticrew4 and Stephen Platt5 Address: 1Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, UK, 2Section of Public Health and Health Policy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, 3Department of Sport, Culture and the Arts, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 4London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK, 5Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK and 6Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, UK Email: David Ogilvie* - ; Richard Mitchell - ; Nanette Mutrie - ; Mark Petticrew - ; Stephen Platt - * Corresponding author Published: 27 August 2008 International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2008, 5:43 doi:10.1186/1479-5868-5-43 Received: 20 February 2008 Accepted: 27 August 2008 This article is available from: http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/5/1/43 © 2008 Ogilvie et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Environmental characteristics may be associated with patterns of physical activity in general or with particular types of physical activity such as active travel (walking or cycling for transport). However, most studies in this field have been conducted in North America and Australia, and hypotheses about putative correlates should be tested in a wider range of sociospatial contexts. We therefore examined the contribution of putative personal and environmental correlates of active travel and overall physical activity in deprived urban neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Scotland as part of the baseline for a longitudinal study of the effects of opening a new urban motorway (freeway). Methods: We conducted a postal survey of a random sample of residents (n = 1322), collecting data on socioeconomic status, perceptions of the local environment, travel behaviour, physical activity and general health and wellbeing using a new 14-item neighbourhood rating scale, a travel diary, the short form of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and the SF-8. We analysed the correlates of active travel and overall physical activity using multivariate logistic regression, first building models using personal (individual and household) explanatory variables and then adding environmental variables. Results: Active travel was associated with being younger, living in owner-occupied accommodation, not having to travel a long distance to work and not having access to a car, whereas overall physical activity was associated with living in social rented accommodation and not being overweight. After adjusting for personal characteristics, neither perceptions of the local environment nor the objective proximity of respondents' homes to motorway or major road infrastructure explained much of the variance in active travel or overall physical activity, although we did identify a significant positive association between active travel and perceived proximity to shops. Conclusion: Apart from access to local amenities, environmental characteristics may have limited influence on active travel in deprived urban populations characterised by a low level of car ownership, in which people may have less capacity for making discretionary travel choices than the populations studied in most published research on the environmental correlates of physical activity. Page 1 of 12 (page number not for citation purposes) International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2008, 5:43 Background Until recently, research on correlates of physical activity was dominated by studies of individual demographic and psychosocial characteristics [1]. This reflected an emphasis on promoting sport, recreation or health-directed exercise using techniques to encourage individual behaviour change [2]. However, there is little evidence that such approaches are effective in increasing physical activity in the medium-to-long term [3]. If habitual patterns of behaviour are environmentally cued, sustained change is likely to require a supportive environment in which people can be active [4,5]. There is therefore increasing interest in the influence of the social and physical environment on physical activity. With respect to the physical (natural or built) environment, a growing body of evidence suggests that certain environmental characteristics may be associated with patterns of physical activity in general or with particular types of physical activity such as walking or cycling as modes of transport [4-10]. Among the correlates most frequently identified in such reviews – some ascertained using 'objective' measures, and others in terms of people's perceptions – are the aesthetic quality of the surroundings, the presence of pavements (sidewalks), the convenience of facilities for being active, the availability of green space, access to amenities (destinations) within walking or cycling distance, safety from traffic and personal attack, and the lack of heavy traffic. Some of these local characteristics reflect higher-order aspects of urban design and spatial policy such as population density, connectivity and mixed land use [6,8]. Importantly, different characteristics may be associated with different types of physical activity; for example, Owen and colleagues found that the aesthetic quality of the surroundings was associated with walking for exercise or recreation and with walking in general, but not with walking for transport, whereas perceptions of traffic were associated with walking for transport and walking in general, but not with walking for exercise or recreation [5]. Despite the growing volume of published studies in this field, many authors remain circumspect in their interpretation of the available evidence. Giles-Corti and Donovan have described access to a supportive physical environment as a necessary, but insufficient, condition for an increase in physical activity in the population [11], while Handy found 'convincing' evidence of an association between physical activity and the built environment in general but 'less convincing' evidence as to which specific environmental characteristics were most strongly associated [7]. One limitation of the available evidence is that most research has been conducted in North America and Australia [9,12], and it is not clear whether associations observed in those countries are generalisable to other set- http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/5/1/43 tings with different aggregate socioeconomic char (...truncated)