| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 體育健康與休閒研究所 === 98 === The lack of Physical Activity (PA) is recognized as a major health concern, due to its contribution to a multiplicity of negative health outcomes. The need to increase PA is a public health priority, especially for older adults, due to the issue of aging population dramatically raising all over the world. Recently, literature on researching the factors effecting PA has started investigating from environmental and politic aspect. And the positive relationship between environment and PA level has been proved by many researches. Yet, built environmental variables have been much less studied in Taiwan, let alone in the elderly. In this context, the aim of this study was to determine whether perceived neighborhood attributes were associated with reported PA levels in Tainan older adults.
This study used a cross-sectional design and self-reported survey. Older adults’ PA levels were measured by The Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly (PASE), and the survey of Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) was partially used to examine the perceived built environment after expert validity test. On-site surveys were send out to 400 over 50 years old subjects in Tainan city and the data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, independent t-test, Pearson product correlation, one way ANOVA, and multiple regression to exam the relationships between demographic variables, built environment, and PA level.
The results in this study showed familiar trend as prier studies, there was a positive relation between built environment and PA level. But there was only one dimension of built environmental factor was selected to the regression model, which was within 3 demographic variables, in the end. We assumed the reasons that the other dimensions were not selected to regression model were related to the differences of land use and transportation. Therefore, future studies should take a closer look on the neighborhood design of the local area and the common way of transportation that local people used, since there is an obvious difference of urban plan and utility rate of scooter between western world and Taiwan. In addition, the use of intervention designs are needed to determine whether the environment–behavior associations that we and others have documented, are actually causal relationships.
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