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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Kara E. MacLeod, MPH, MA, Traffic Safety Center, University of California, 140 Warren Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360, May-Choo Wang, DrPH, School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, 140 Warren Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360, 510 643 8275, maywang@berkeley.edu, Gilbert C. Gee, PhD, Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, 1420 Washington Heights, Rm, M5224, Ann Arbor, MI 48102, and Pat Crawford, DrPH, RD, Center for Weight and Health, UC Berkeley, 9 Morgan Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Purpose: Television watching, a sedentary activity, has been associated with overweight in children. While the family environment is known to influence television watching, little is known about the influence of the neighborhood environment. This study aims to determine if socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood environment are associated with television watching among 9-10 year old girls. Methods: We used data collected by the Berkeley site of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study (NGHS) in 1987-88 from 640 girls who had a complete set of data relevant to our analysis. Relevant NGHS variables included parental education, household income, physical activity, scholastic competence scale, and weekly hours spent watching television. Addresses of the girls were geocoded, and median household income for 1989 (from the census) was used to indicate the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood. Multilevel modeling procedures were used to estimate fixed effect coefficients for individual and neighborhood level variables. Results: Nearly 12% of the variance in TV watching was due to neighborhood differences. After adjusting for individual level variables, socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood continued to be associated with TV watching. The effects of household income, which was negatively associated with TV watching, were eliminated after neighborhood income was included in the analysis. There was no significant interaction between household income and neighborhood income. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the neighborhood environment may influence activity choices among children. Higher income neighborhoods that provide safe recreational facilities may have greater capacity to support out-of-home activity.

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