Physical activity (PA), sedentary behavior (SB) and sleep are associated with cancer risk and cancer outcomes. However, measuring these behaviors accurately is difficult because self-reports are often unreliable, and objective monitoring is expensive, time consuming, and is often associated with poor compliance. The overall objective of this study was to improve the assessment of three health behaviors linked to cancer--physical activity (PA), sedentary behavior (SB) and sleep--and examine how objective measures of these behaviors are related to features of the built environment collected from multiple samples living in different geographic regions of the US. This was a 4-center collaborative pilot study being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and three other TREC sites: University of California at San Diego, Washington University, and Harvard University. The UPenn site of the study was led by Dr. Karen Glanz in collaboration with Jonathan Mitchell, PhD.
The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the convergent validity of objective and self-reported data on physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep collected from multiple samples living in different geographic regions of the US.
Secondary aims of this study included:
- Examining the feasibility and validity of a wrist mounted accelerometer to contemporaneously measure physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep.
- Examining the feasibility of deploying and using GPS in an ethnically diverse cohort to develop GIS-matched measures of the built environment relevant to physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep.
- Describing the inter- and independent patterns (e.g., volume, type) of objectively measured physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep among individuals with different cancer status (survivor vs. healthy), and investigating whether these patterns are related to characteristics of the built environment (e.g., neighborhood walkability) and time spent in different locations (e.g., in neighborhood vs. out of neighborhood).