Question

This unit will introduce you to the multitude of factors in the built environment that play a role in physical activity behavior. The environments in which we live work and play have varying levels of support for physical activity. This unit will help you to understand both barriers and facilitators to physical activity participation within the built environment and think about how we can have a positive impact on the spaces in which we commonly spend time.

Discuss:

1. The article "The Role of the Built Environments in Physical Activity, Obesity, and CVD" presents as ecological model of four domains of physical activity. The push is to create multi-level, multi-sector approaches to physical activity promotion. Describe a physical activity intervention/program you are aware of. Describe it and then share what domains, levels, and sectors of the ecological model it reached and which it didn't reach. Is there evidence to show this intervention/program was successful/unsuccessful? What do you know about its effectiveness? Are there things that you believe would improve it and help it be more impactful? Describe, support, and discuss.

2. In the Robert Wood Johnson Research Brief on Physical Activity and the Built Environment, it discusses how car-reliance has increased and individuals walking to work has decreased. Find information to support why this shift has occurred and if there are successful approaches out there to increase active transportation. Pretend you were just hired by the SDSU wellness center to increase active transportation within the SDSU community. Based on the research you found on the topic, what would we need to do in the SDSU campus community to decrease the number of students who drive to class and increase the number who walk/ride a bike to class? Support your idea with evidence based information. Mark Fenton will get you thinking about factors to consider as a starting point in his videos.

Answer 1

Answer1.

The ecological model emphasises that  multiple levels of influence on behavior, ranging from individual and social factors, to institutional, community, built environment, and policy, can alter the changes in the motivation and adoption of physical activity in target or vulnerable populations.

Built environments are the totality of places that are organised by human beings including buildings, grounds around buildings, transportation facilities, and recreational public spaces like parks and trails. Policies can be laws and regulations at any level of government, corporate practices, and rules at institutions like schools. Changing built environments and policies is expected to have long term impact on the people inhabiting those spaces. Accordingly, the ecological model maps out four domains of life that describe how people spend their time: leisure/recreation/exercise, occupation (school for youth), transportation, and household. These domains are regulated by the arrangement of a particular type of built environment which increases or decreases access to physical mobility and an active lifestyles to the occupants of that space.

In the case of physical activity, a multi-dimensional approach seems to ensure greater effectiveness of a physical activity programme at the institutional level. These include informational approaches of community-based and mass media campaigns, and short physical activity messages targeting key community sites and school-based strategies that encompass physical education, classroom activities, after-school sports, creation and maintenance of access to places for physical activity with informational outreach activities. Such an approach can be rugged to effectively reach out to people of several domains of ecology including schools, community involvement as well as recreational spaces which focus on exercise and physical fitness such as community pools, parks, neighbourhood sports fields which give greater opportunities an motivation to the residents to engage in a healthier and active lifestyle. In this regard, the Provision of parks and recreation is found to be an effective intervention since public parks are not only function of government in all developed countries and therefore manadatory and easily accessible part of town planning, but also because parks and recreation facilities are generally accessible to populations at highest risk of inactivity and are available at low user costs,. They are therefore beneficial part of the domain of ecological environment as they are positioned to play a role in disease prevention.