Is Your Child Getting Enough Exercise? How to Make Physical Activity Fun and Easy
"A cross-cultural study adapts a questionnaire to help Spanish-speaking families evaluate their children's physical activity levels and find engaging ways to keep them moving."
In today's world, where screens often dominate our children's leisure time, ensuring they get enough physical activity can feel like a constant battle. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that children and youth engage in at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily to maintain optimal health. But how do we realistically assess their activity levels and, more importantly, make exercise a fun and sustainable part of their lives?
Measuring physical activity can be tricky. While sophisticated tools like accelerometers and pedometers exist, they're not always practical for everyday use, especially in schools. That's where self-report questionnaires come in. These tools allow us to gain insights into a child's activity habits, but they need to be carefully adapted to different cultures and languages to ensure they accurately reflect real-world behaviors.
A recent study published in the journal Arch Argent Pediatr tackled this challenge head-on. Researchers in Spain undertook the task of adapting and validating the 'Previous Day Physical Activity Recall' (PDPAR) questionnaire for use with Spanish-speaking children aged 10 and 11. Their work offers valuable lessons for anyone interested in promoting physical activity in a culturally sensitive and effective way.
Adapting the Questionnaire: A Deep Dive into Cultural Relevance
The PDPAR questionnaire is designed to assess physical activity during leisure and free time. It asks children to recall their activities in 30-minute blocks and rate the intensity of each activity. The original questionnaire includes a list of common activities, each with a corresponding metabolic equivalent (MET) value, which represents the energy expenditure of that activity. The adaptation process involved several key steps to ensure the questionnaire was relevant and understandable for Spanish-speaking children:
- Back Translation: The Spanish version was then translated back into English by two native English speakers who were unaware of the original questionnaire. This step helped to identify any discrepancies or inaccuracies in the initial translation.
- Expert Review: A committee of seven bilingual experts in the field of physical activity evaluated the translations for semantic, idiomatic, and cultural equivalence. They assessed whether the translated items retained the meaning of the original and whether the activities described were relevant to Spanish children.
- Cultural Adaptation: The researchers recognized that some activities and time frames in the original questionnaire were not directly applicable to the Spanish context. For example, they replaced 'housework/paperwork' with 'duties/study' to better reflect the activities of Spanish schoolchildren. They also adjusted the time blocks to align with the typical school day in Spain.
- Pretesting: The adapted questionnaire was then pretested with a group of 32 schoolchildren to assess its acceptability and clarity. The researchers looked for any mismatched answers or difficulties in understanding the questions.
Key Findings and Practical Implications
The results of the study showed that the adapted PDPAR questionnaire achieved appropriate semantic, idiomatic, and conceptual equivalence, with a high content validity index. The test-retest analysis demonstrated excellent reliability, with an ICC of 0.99 for total metabolic equivalents and ICCs of 0.98 and 0.97 for moderate and vigorous physical activity blocks, respectively. These findings suggest that the adapted questionnaire is a valid and reliable tool for assessing physical activity in Spanish-speaking children aged 10 and 11.