Reproducibility of the past year and historical self-administered total physical activity questionnaire among older women.
Few studies have evaluated the reliability of a self-administered current and historical physical activity questionnaire (PAQ) among middle-aged and elderly women. We evaluated the reliability of a self-administered PAQ designed to assess total (24 h) current and historical physical activity at age 15, 30, and 50 years, which was completed by a subgroup of 303 women aged 56-75 years from the Swedish Mammography Cohort (SMC). Total physical activity covered occupational and household activity as well as walking/bicycling, exercise, and inactivity (sitting watching TV/reading). Reliabilities (1-year test-retest) of continuous activity measures in metabolic equivalents were evaluated using an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC); classification consistency was evaluated using sensitivity and specificity statistics. The ICC for total current physical activity was 0.69; for specific types of activities the ICC ranged from 0.49 to 0.59; for historical physical activity, the reliabilities for total activity ranged from 0.75 for age 50 to 0.81 for age 30 years, being substantial for occupational activities (ICC = 0.73-0.75), and fair to moderate for inactivity (ICC = 0.31-0.60). These data indicate that the PAQ used in the SMC is a satisfactory and reproducible measure of current and historical physical activity, for total as well as for different types of activities.
Orsini
Nicola
N
Division of Nutritional Epidemiology, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden. nicola.orsini@ki.se
Bellocco
Rino
R
Bottai
Matteo
M
Pagano
Marcello
M
Wolk
Alicja
A
D000368:Aged; D015444:Exercise; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008019:Life Style; D008875:Middle Aged; D009790:Occupations; D010809:Physical Fitness; D011998:Recreation / Q000502:physiology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013997:Time Factors