An multinational group of researchers used fitness trackers to compare people’s self-reported levels of physical activity to their actual levels of physical activity.
According to the findings, nobody ever gets it properly. Responses from the United States indicate a level of activity on par with that of the Dutch and the English. Elderly believe they can keep up with the quickest of youngsters.
However, statistics show that Americans are significantly less active than Europeans, and that the elderly are even less so than the young.
Does this suggest that the English and the Dutch overestimate their level of physical activity, while the Americans lie about it?
According to the study’s lead author and executive director of the Center for Economic. According to Kapteyn, cultural and environmental factors determine the various perspectives on fitness.
Kapteyn noted that while many Americans rely heavily on automobiles, many Dutch people instead choose to walk or ride bicycles to go around town.
The research was appeared in the April 11 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Contents
Perceptions and Realities of Physical Fitness in the United States.
Researchers followed up with 540 persons in the United States, 748 in the Netherlands, and 254 in England.
Participants in the study, including men and women aged 18 and above, were asked to rate their level of physical activity on a scale from “not at all active” to “extremely active.” So that researchers could gauge how active they really were over the course of a week, they also wore an accelerometer on their wrists.
Researchers observed that whereas Americans were more inclined to place themselves at either the “extremely active” or “inactive” extremities of the scale, the Dutch and English were marginally more likely to place themselves in the “moderate” centre. In spite of this, there were only minor to no significant differences between how participants in the three nations rated their own physical activity levels.
Data from the monitors showed that the United States’ population was significantly less active than that of the Netherlands’ and the United Kingdom’s. Compared to the Dutch, roughly twice as many Americans fall into the “not active” category.
Age-Specific Doses of Reality
Using fitness tracker data, we can see that there is an overall decline in activity levels across all three countries as people age. Still, 60% of Americans were inactive, compared to 42% of Dutch and 32% of English participants, suggesting that inactivity is more frequent among older Americans than in the other countries.
Participants who self-reported as “extremely active” or “very inactive” showed the largest discrepancies in their self-reported and measured levels of physical activity across all three nations.
According to Kapteyn, “people of various ages have diverse expectations of what it means to be physically active.” They modify their expectations depending on age and life experience.
Kapteyn argued that precise measurements are crucial to science because of the importance of physical activity to a healthy lifestyle. The results suggest that researchers should exercise caution when interpreting and comparing data from international fitness studies that have employed standardised questionnaires.
Last Words
Self-reported data “requires respondents to not only have a common knowledge of survey words but also to reliably recall the physical activity that they describe,” Kapteyn said. Future research may be more trustworthy thanks to the widespread availability of inexpensive activity tracking devices.
