Content of review 1, reviewed on February 13, 2014

GENERAL COMMENTS

This is an interesting paper, describing the rationale and design of a study to be performed in adolescents in New Zealand. THere are some issues about the survey that woudl deserve to be detailed a bit more.

In this paper, Hinckson and colleagues describe the design of a cross sectional study, to be performed in New Zealand adolescents, to investigate the relationships between characteristics of the built environment and physical activity, sedentary behaviour, anthropometrics and some social variables. This is an important public health research topic where there is a paucity of data in this age range.

An original feature of the planned study is the use of a web-based structured interview using a specific software (VERITAS), together with GPS measures, to better assess neighborhood boundaries as reported by participants and localize the place where activities will take place. Another interesting feature of the planned study is to include qualitative assessment of factors associated with behaviours of interest in a subsample.

There are some issues of concern. One is about the use of the VERITAS software, very likely an innovative aspect of the study. The

applicability and feasibility of this method to an adolescent population is however not detailed. Also, from the protocol, it seems that there will no physical activity questionnaire used. It may be of interest though to know the proportion of active mobility vs. total physical activity, as well as other types of activity in youth, for which questionnaires remain an important assessment tool.

Specific comments

  • Page 6, 2nd para: it is stated that “GIS will be used to calculate three built environmental measures”. The authors should be more specific about the GIS databases they plan to use, the scale of the data, what the “raw scores” they mention will be, and how this relates to other indices described in other studies.

  • Page 7, 1st para: here the authors mention the Maori subsample, but there is no mention earlier in the text about the ethnic differences to be studied

  • Page 13, last para; how will self-selection be taken in to account could be explained in more details

Source

    © 2014 the Reviewer (source).

References

    A., H. E., Scott, D., Melody, O., Suzanne, M., Ester, C., Hannah, B., Tom, S., Vivienne, I., Julia, M., Grant, S. 2014. Built environment and physical activity in New Zealand adolescents: a protocol for a cross-sectional study. BMJ Open.