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Volume 08 Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education Public Health Summit 2018
May 24-25, 2018
May 24-25, 2018 Osaka, Japan
4th World Congress on
Public Health, Epidemiology & Nutrition
Novel approaches to understanding child health and built environments
Melody Smith, Jinfeng Zhao and Niamh Donnellan
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Built environments can have significant and enduring impacts on children’s physical activity behaviours including active
transport and independent mobility, ultimately impacting body size. Yet, little is actually known of the ways children
use urban space and the types and characteristics of places that are important to children. Neighbourhoods for active kids
is a cross-sectional study of 1102 children aged 9-12 years, residing in Auckland, New Zealand. Children completed an
online participatory geographic information systems survey to capture spatially-linked information about neighbourhood
perceptions, use and experiences from the child’s perspective. Destinations marked by children were classified for their
primary purpose and the distance from home calculated. For each destination, children reported contextual information about
that setting. Children’s body size and physical activity were objectively assessed and parents completed a telephone survey for
socio-demographic information. This presentation will explore the differing spatial patterns of time use in the dataset, drawing
from the neighbourhood mapping activity and examine the relationships between these patterns of time use and body size in
children. This process provides a more complete picture of health behaviors and context (e.g., active transport with friends)
than investigating one variable alone (e.g., activity) and ignoring the context in which the behavior occurs. Cluster analysis
and visualization approaches will be used to explore multidimensional patters of time use in association with body size. Study
findings provide new insights and contributions to the field of environments and health, particularly around environmental
perceptions and travel modes to destinations.
J Community Med Health Educ 2018, Volume 8
DOI: 10.4172/2161-0711-C2-036