Environmental Correlates of Physical Activity And Walking in Adults and Children: A Review of Reviews

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to summarise evidence on the environmental correlates of physical activity and walking. A review of reviews was undertaken to identify evidence on the strength of association between environmental factors and physical activity for both children and adults. The exposure variables were a range of measures reflecting elements of the physical environment, and the outcomes of interest were total physical activity and specifically walking behaviour. Electronic searches were conducted using Medline Cinhal, ERIC, Psychlit and Sportsdiscus databases as well as hand searches of references list and selected key journals. The focus was to identify published papers reporting on the factors associated with physical activity in children and adult populations; these are referred to as ‘correlates ’ or ‘determinants ’ studies. The initial search identified over 200 papers, of which only 13 papers met the inclusion criteria and were included. These review papers varied in quality and approach taken to reviewing and presenting their results. Despite these variations some common themes were identified across the studies in terms of both results on environmental correlates and the methodological weaknesses of this field of research. A summary table presents the key environmental factors that show consistent and statistical association with physical activity behaviour in adults. For physical activity, 11 review papers

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