Results of workshop work group
Work Group I: Measures of the Food and Physical Activity Environment: Instruments

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Abstract

A work group was convened to identify the core challenges, content gaps, and corresponding possible solutions for improving food- and physical activity–environment instrumentation. Identified challenges included instrument proliferation, the scaling or grain of instruments and appropriate aggregation to the neighborhood or community level, and unknown sensitivity to change of most instruments. Solutions for addressing these challenges included establishing an interactive and real-time instrument repository, developing and enforcing high standards for instrument reporting, increasing community-researcher collaborations, and implementing surveillance of food and physical activity environment. Solid instrumentation will accelerate a better understanding of food- and physical activity–environment effects on eating and physical activity behaviors.

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

—Lord Kelvin

Introduction

Accurate measurement is a cornerstone of science, with improvements in knowledge intricately dependent on solid instrumentation that is reliable (consistent and repeatable); valid (measuring what it purports to measure); and sensitive to meaningful change. Emerging research areas, such as the study of environmental influences on eating and physical activity, present an opportunity to learn from measurement missteps in other research fields. Such missteps have included limited psychometric testing of instruments,1 lack of theoretical or conceptual models underlying measurement,2 and the need to balance appropriately thorough instrumentation in order to capture complicated constructs with needless proliferation of instruments to assess the same or similar enough constructs.3

The 2007 Measures of the Food and Built Environment workshop, sponsored by the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, included four work groups tasked to address various aspects of measures development in food and physical activity environments.4 One of the work groups addressed instrumentation to assess food and physical activity environments. This paper summarizes current problems in instrumentation that emerged from the work group's discussion and provides recommendations on how to begin to address or prevent potential problems. In doing so, we hope to shape a more efficient overall approach to instrumentation that leads to better measurement, greater comparability across studies, and more definitive estimates of association and effect on related behaviors and health.

Section snippets

Challenges

Current core challenges facing investigators making decisions about food- and physical activity–environment instrumentation include when and whether to develop new instruments, the importance of sensitivity to community needs, preferences, and changes in the food and physical activity environment, and the scale or grain of instruments. Each challenge is briefly discussed.

Recommendations

In response to the core issues described above, the Instrumentation Work Group recommends making information about food- and physical activity–environment instruments more readily available, creating incentives for sharing instruments and associated measurement data, increasing community and research collaborations, and establishing surveillance for key constructs.

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