ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Physical Activity in the Prevention and Management of Disease
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1560435
This article is part of the Research TopicPhysical Activity in Urban Areas: Where and When?View all 3 articles
Association between neighborhood environment and self-reported and objectively measured physical activity in Hispanic families
Provisionally accepted
- 1Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
- 2San Diego State University, San Diego, California, United States
- 3Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States
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Objective: Given the limited information about how neighborhood environment relates to physical activity (PA) in Hispanic families, this work examined cross-sectional associations between perceived neighborhood environment and PA of Hispanic parents and children. Methods: Participants were 137 Hispanic parent-child dyads (children aged 6-11 years) in South Phoenix, AZ, USA. Parents completed a survey about their own and their child's PA, and perceptions of neighborhood environment (i.e., scores of walking/cycling, neighborhood aesthetics, traffic safety, and crime rate) using NEWS survey. Participants also wore an accelerometer for 7 days.Results: Children engaged in 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) on 2.3, and parents in 30 minutes of MVPA on 2.1 days per weeks. Additionally, children engaged in 104.4 minutes, and parents in 65.3 minutes of accelerometer-assessed MVPA per day. Participants rated their neighborhood (range 0-4) as favorable regarding walking/cycling (mean score 3.1), aesthetics (2.4), traffic safety (2.5), and crime rate (3.1). In Spearman correlation analyses, better neighborhood aesthetics was correlated associated with higher accelerometer-assessed MVPA in children (r = 0.25, p = 0.04). Multiple linear regression analyses revealed an association between traffic safety and parent-reported MVPA in children (standardized beta coefficient 0.19, p = 0.03). No further associations between scores of neighborhood environment and physical activity in either children or parents were observed. Conclusion: Our findings may underscore the importance of neighborhood aesthetics and traffic safety for PA engagement in children. Longitudinal studies are needed to confirm our observations, and to untangle potential mechanisms linking neighborhood environment and PA in understudied populations such as Hispanics.
Keywords: accelerometry, Behavioral Science, Exercise, community-based research, environment
Received: 14 Jan 2025; Accepted: 30 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nissen, Fraga, Woll, Vega-López, Krell-Roesch and Crespo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Janina Krell-Roesch, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
Noe C Crespo, San Diego State University, San Diego, 92182, California, United States
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