Parental report of outdoor playtime as a measure of physical activity in preschool-aged children.
BACKGROUND
Keeping young children physically active is an important strategy to promote their health and well-being. To our knowledge, survey measures of physical activity in preschool-aged children are unavailable. Time spent playing outdoors is a potential surrogate measure of physical activity in preschoolers, but parental-report measures of outdoor playtime have not been evaluated.


OBJECTIVE
To compare a direct measure of physical activity in preschool-aged children with 2 parental-report measures of children's outdoor playtime.


METHODS
Three days of recording with a 3-dimensional accelerometer were used to directly measure physical activity in 250 preschool-aged children. We calculated each child's average vector magnitude per minute while awake. Parental report of outdoor playtime was measured in 2 ways: (1). the score from a checklist used to record outdoor playtime over 3 days and (2). a recall of the usual minutes of daily outdoor playtime during the prior month. We calculated Spearman rank correlation coefficients among these 3 measures.


RESULTS
The mean age of the children was 44 months, 87.7% were white, and 12.3% were black. Parents reported that their children spent a mean (+/-SD) of 146 (+/-113) minutes playing outdoors each day. Physical activity as measured by the accelerometer was significantly correlated to the time spent playing outdoors, as measured by the checklist (r = 0.33, P <.001) and recall (r = 0.20, P =.003).


CONCLUSIONS
Parental-report measures of outdoor playtime were significantly correlated to a direct measure of physical activity in preschool-aged children, and are worthy of future evaluation as a survey measure.
Burdette
Hillary L
HL
Divisions of General and Community Pediatrics and Cardiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. burdette@email.chop.edu
Whitaker
Robert C
RC
Daniels
Stephen R
SR
D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology*; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D010988:Play and Playthings; D012621:Seasons; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013997:Time Factors