A Behaviour Settings Approach to Impacts of ICTs, Travel Behaviour and Built Environment on Physical Activity more

A Behaviour Settings Approach to Impacts of ICTs, Travel Behaviour and Built Environment on Physical Activity Karen Quinn Fung January 27, 2010 PLAN 581 (2009W-2) Professor Lawrence Frank Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 Introduction Both scholarly and popular attention has been focused on the issue of obesity and its consequences on public health in developed countries. It follows that there is a great deal of interest in the things about contemporary lifestyles that might cause obesity, and how these trends might be reversed. One stream of research seeks to describe and quantify the interaction between the built environment and its impacts on public health outcomes, through encouraging or discouraging physical activity. The recent growth and popularity in a number of information and communication technologies (ICTs), included but not limited to television, video games and the Internet, have also been correlated with declining rates of physical activity. The interaction between these two inquiries, integrating research from the fields of urban planning, public health, social cohesion, and Internet studies, are in the nascent stages of being explored academically. Meanwhile, innovations in gaming and mobile Internet software applications offer a range of new opportunities for intervention in support of public health and related community objectives. Through a literature review, I will briefly survey the state of knowledge on the interaction of the built environmental on physical activity levels and social capital, then on the relationship between ICTs, social capital and physical activity. I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using a -2- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 behaviour settings approach to bridge and apply these two streams of research. Public Health and Physical Activity As developed countries have made advances that have enhanced the quality of life for the majority of citizens, these same countries are experiencing new public health challenges as a result of unintended consequences of those well-intended changes. As Frumkin, Frank and Jackson (2004) describe, physical activity has largely been engineered out of everyday life, in a successive variety of ways. This has resulted in widespread sedentary behaviour, with only 26.2 percent of adults achieving recommended levels of physical activity. This poses a challenge for public health, as physical activity is a critical part of a number of public health outcomes, such as improving quality of life, lengthening life spans, and reducing ongoing long-term health care costs by emphasizing preventative measures over curative medicine that treats diseases and chronic conditions once they have already developed. Despite a great deal of emphasis culturally on at least the outward appearances of health, a range of other factors are keeping people from engaging in more physical activity for healthier lifestyles. Culturally, attention is generally paid more to recreational physical activity and less on physical activity for utilitarian purposes — significant because the impact of built environment and social factors -3- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 for each of these purposes are very different. Sallis and Owen categorize the factors affecting physical activity levels as demographic and biological factors; psychological, cognitive and emotional factors; physical environment factors; and physical activity characteristics. In an ecological model, these factors interact in complex ways, with persons trading off the benefits of each category according to their preferences and abilities (as proposed by the behaviour settings theory). This paper explores linkages between those psychological, cognitive and emotional factors, with features of the physical environment, through the concept of social capital, the emergence of mobile Internet tools that permit both social networking and spatial awareness, and the relationships between social networks and travel patterns. Built Environment The term ‘built environment’ broadly refers to both micro- and macro-level features of cities that, taken collectively, affect peoples’ interactions with each other and the broader environment. Frank, Engelke and Schmid (2003) break this down further into three components: transportation systems, land use patterns, and urban design characteristics. Each sets the stage for active or sedentary behaviour through mediating access between a person and their goals in traversing space, using time, and managing social relations. -4- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 Land Use Patterns Land use patterns are most significant for their contribution to the placement of origins and destinations, which has a large bearing on which methods are required to get to where one wants to go — and, consequently, do what one wants or needs to do. Frank et al (2003, 37) focus on two attributes of land use: density and mixing of land uses. Density refers to compactness of the uses of land, which helps make destinations more proximate, i.e. closer together; while mixed land uses refers to allowing for spaces designated for different purposes to be located near one another. Taken in hand with supportive urban design and transportation network characteristics, the two implications of density and mixed use — shorter distances between local destinations, and the ability to do more once you are there — make walking and cycling not only more viable and attractive travel methods, but competitive modes when compared to the automobile. Urban Design Characteristics Under the umbrella of ‘urban design characteristics’, Frank et al (2003, 152) refer to design elements of streets and sites. These features profoundly influence the safety of those choosing nonmotorized travel means in traffic interactions and negotiations, as well as their overall experience of travel on an aesthetic level and sense of -5- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 community. Whereas roads were once seen exclusively as the domain of engineers optimizing routes solely for automobile traffic, there is now growing awareness and support for designing streets that appropriately serve and suit a broader range of users — such as those traveling by non-motorized modes — and uses —associated with public spaces, green spaces and architectural considerations. Transportation Systems Features of the transportation system affecting the likelihood of using walking and cycling as means of travel include street networks, networks of mode-segregated routes, and public transit systems. Street networks are central as they, by definition, connect places to one another and enable us to get from the proverbial point A to point B. Connectivity describes how well-connected destinations are. Highly connected areas have streets intersecting with other streets at a high rate, resulting in a large number of blocks that are smaller in size. In contrast, areas of poor connectivity have blocks that are large and disconnected from each other with few intersections, hence requiring more road travel for destinations which may geographically not actually be that far apart. The three general types of street networks are grid, organic and hierarchical, with the latter being characterized by low connectivity. Connectivity is vitally important in discussions of active -6- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 transportation. The hierarchical street network, popular in conditions of sprawl, assumes that the costs of traversing these distances are negligible. However, the costs manifest in two ways: as fuel and time. For active utilitarian modes of transportation, neither of these (where fuel can be equated to sheer physical effort) are negligible — both are to be kept as low as possible. Mode-specific path network options have some intuitive benefits: they can provide safety and convenience for each mode, and different experiences of scale, as driving, cycling and walking all result in different perceptions of the landscapes based on perceiving detail. Whether they become preferred routes, again, is related closely to how viable they are for a range of origins and destinations. Both modespecific networks and public transit networks are also significant to our discussion, as they also potentially lend different social dimensions to travel, and each mode’s particularities contribute or detract from their attractiveness and viability. Built Environment and Physical Activity At this juncture, I have highlighted many of the key points of connection between the built environment and physical activity — how the positioning of the venues connected to the needs of everyday life, and the qualities of the spaces in between, affect what is required to ultimately meet our goals as participants in society. What has been left -7- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 largely unsaid throughout is the specific contribution of sprawl configurations of the built environment to sedentary, car-dependent behaviours, which are much more common in newer settlements in developed countries. In summary, sprawl environments separate kinds of places so that they are farther apart with regards to travel distance required, and the nature of the streets are so that travel by means other than automobile are time-expensive, unsafe, and in many cases aesthetically unappealing. For many populations, this combination results in severe physical activity constraints, leading to high risk for ailments such as diabetes, stroke, obesity and heart disease. I turn now to address a wholly different, but still related, category of effects as a result of those conditions: the effect on communities. Social Capital The concept of social capital has been instrumental in allowing sociologists to describe the qualities of vitality, trust and dynamism in community life that make certain places better to live in. Communities high in social capital see higher levels of trust in community members towards neighbours and outsiders, and members of the community are aware of the skills and competencies which members can contribute in service of group objectives, be this intended only for selected groups within communities only or the community as a whole. Social capital eloquently describes the balance maintained between strong -8- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 interpersonal ties and weak interpersonal ties, and the value they both contribute to helping both individuals and groups meet their needs. Markers of social capital include participation in voluntary and civic activities, trust and satisfaction with neighbours, church attendance, tolerance towards minority groups, and perceptions of honesty, morality and trustworthiness. Frumkin, Frank and Schmid (2003) examine social capital to tease out its relationship to sprawl and health. They trace the recent history social capital’s decline, as described by Robert Putnam in his work Bowling Alone, citing evidence that social bonds are key and central to mental health and mortality rates (169), and may have some additional impact as well on overall health. It also contributes to health in other environmental factors, such as decreased violent crime, lower teen birth rates, and more leisure-time physical activity. Social Capital and Sprawl With regards to sprawl, Frumkin et al. (2003) conclude that the built environment of a neighbourhood does indeed have some bearing on the quality of community life of that neighbourhood, identifying particularly the features of walkability, public spaces and mixed use. We can recognize from some of the previous discussions of the built environment why this might be the case: less time spent in or money spent on automobiles in meeting everyday basic needs enables more -9- Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 time or resources to be directed towards civic pursuit. This also opens up more possibilities for spontaneous interactions with people en route, or time to be spent on recreational physical activity. Sprawl, however, is not the only phenomenon that has emerged in the years since social capital has declined. The affordability of computers, popularity of video games, and widespread availability of the Internet has destabilized and changed the parameters of community life at least as much as, if not much more than, sprawl has. Social Capital and ICTs The precise nature of the effect of the Internet, video games or other communication technologies on social capital is inconsistent and unclear. Intuitively, the time spent in front of a computer displaces time spent on another pursuit, which include social face-to-face interaction or physical activity. The social cues used to navigate reallife interactions are generally not involved to the same extent in online interactions. This can be of particularly concern to young people, who are typically in the process of developing skills, coping mechanisms and negotiating their adult selves through in-person face-to-face social interactions. However, newer applications of ICTs such as social network systems (SNSes) like MySpace and Facebook, and many applications popularly dubbed “Web 2.0,” have an explicit social element to them. According to Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe (2007), - 10 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 Facebook promotes more offline-to-online activity among college-age adults than reverse — meaning that there are more people connecting online with people they already know offline, rather than networking with new people online in order to meet them face-to-face. Rather than destroying or displacing opportunities for generating social capital, Ellison et al. describe the nature of social capital evolving with the emergence of SNSes. Instead of losing the power of one’s social network as a result of moving out of one’s hometown, ICTs are enabling people to maintain their social capital across distance and time, and also has the capability of helping those with lower social capital to begin with, to engage more meaningfully with their surrounding environments engaging in social activity online that they may not have been able to offline, by broadening their access to bridging social capital. As ICTs have developed, they are evolving not only to become more social, but also to increasingly become more relevant to activity conducted spatially. Hanson and Fontaine (2007) focus on what ICTs enable with regards to access to transacting with institutions or information. The altered nature of access has an impact on time allocation practices, which, as we’ve previously observed in our discussions of sprawl, have consequences for physical activity. - 11 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 ICTs and Physical Activity Earlier manifestations of information technology such as the desktop computer and video games meant that ICTs were almost exclusively relegated as promoting sedentary behaviour (Owen et al., 2000). More recent innovations, as described by Hanson and Fontaine (2007), provide compelling counterexamples to this generalization about ICTs: • For video games, rigorous or moderate physical activity can be incorporated into game play, as occurs for Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Fit. • GPS-enabled devices enable and induce a host of Internettracked spatial interactions, such as geocaching, which encourages people to explore their surrounding physical environments through a “hidden treasure hunt” model with GPS coordinates posted on websites. To these examples, I would add that mobile Internet, coupled with location-aware devices, has opened up a host of applications for interacting with information, aforementioned social networking services, and the immediate environment. This includes applications for obtaining scheduled or real-time public transit information and location-aware messaging services for connecting people in both realtime and spatially. Hanson and Fontaine also discuss a particular - 12 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 confluence of these factors in the phenomenon of “flocking,” characterized by people with certain interests gathering in a highly public place to do an unexpected activity — examples include Internetorganized pillow fights or games of urban Capture The Flag. This speaks to what Hanson and Fontaine refer to as the phenomenon of instant access enabled by information technology, and they describe various applications of IT being used to encourage physical activity, both utilitarian and recreational. Most saliently for discussions involving the built environment and transport, however, is Hanson and Fontaine’s assertion that these technologies permit a potentially greater degree of control by the individual over time allocation, enabling time to be freed up for either recreational or utilitarian physical activity. I propose that the social networking component (the “communication” in ICTs) means that there are avenues and methods to solicit support or participation from existing social networks in helping individuals achieve their physical activity goals, or, on the social side, to stay in touch with neighbours and neighbourhood events, without the explicit requirement of time and space encounters. Axhausen (2005) offers some interesting hypotheses along these lines: It seems likely, that people concentrate their efforts on fewer people, with whom they share a lot of detail, while the contacts with [their weak ties] become more superficial and generic. The distribution of the contact - 13 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 densities should sift, as fewer people can draw on a joint experience of a specifically local everyday life. […] This description also implies that persons can be more selective in their choice of contacts, as they can maintain friendship independently of the spatial distance to a person. One would assume that this should lead to more satisfaction from the contacts […] as one can rely less on chance encounters and less on the grapevine to spread news in a detailed and self-correct way through multiple channels. Such a spatially distributed social network brings the efficiencies or deficiencies in the forms of our cities into harsh relief. If our social lives become more time-expensive and/or fuel-expensive to maintain, the quality of our relationships may become a function of how easily we can allocate time or resources or meet other goals (such as for physical activity or “tours” of multiple destinations) in our time spent seeing them, even as the cost of maintaining mediated contact approaches negligible. Carrasco et al.’s previous work on the effect of social networks on travel behaviour is informative with regards to research into this inquiry. Behaviour Settings I turn now to the concept of behaviour settings, an approach built upon by Owen et al. (2000) to characterize situations in which physical activity does or does not take place. Owen et al. summarize the concept as, “those social and physical situations in which behaviour takes place, by promoting and sometimes demanding certain actions and by discouraging or prohibiting others.” This model was refined with Sallis and Owen’s categories of factors affecting physical activity in mind. Owen et al. developed a schematic representation of behaviour - 14 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 settings (see Appendix 1) to show how the factors highlighted by Sallis and Owen act as the behavioural backdrop and context in which physical activity choices are made. Our exploration of ICTs and their potential impact on physical activity would seem to indicate some updates that can be made to their schematic. The function of socializing now has an additional “setting” — online. The behaviour choices now include physically active forms of video games, or physically active loosely organized recreational programs (as the aforementioned Capture the Flag game would fall under), as well traditionally sedentary methods of online interaction through computer use. Further, the function of “commuting” now may also include commuting for leisure. Given that leisure may not be subject to hard scheduling constraints due to the availability of real-time coordination via mobile communication, it is conceivable that commuting for leisure is more amenable to having a secondary goal of helping a person meet their physical activity goals through active transportation. At this point, we can come full circle and bring the form of the built environment back into our discussion. Mixed-use settings provide a physical form of near-instant access to different land use functions, spatially mimicking the instant access to different contexts (work, social, personal logistics) provided by ICTs. Furthermore, the centrality of these technologies in coordinating and maintaining social ties with - 15 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 both far-flung and nearby friends and acquaintances, means that those living either with short commutes by any mode, or commutes during which mobile Internet applications can be accessed (such as commuter train rides with mobile Internet access, or, less favorably, a congested commute where the driver can take their eyes of the road to use mobile software applications) disproportionately have more time to be able to give attention to performing online social activities. Conclusion This paper has engaged in a general inquiry into increasing physical activity among children and adults. I have described how recent innovations in video games and communication technologies have allowed persons to engage, in meaningfully social ways, in physical activity as a by-product of what has traditionally been framed as leisure activity. Previous studies of the built environment and physical activity have generally considered ICTs as a purely sedentary setting and an obstacle to physical activity; so these new applications showing that, to the extent ICTs interact with social capital, they should be reframed as a tool through which users can exercise choice. The concept of behaviour settings illuminates the degree to which a person’s values interact with the various costs and benefits — temporal, monetary, social, and physical — of the choices available to them for achieving their everyday goals. This suggests that making - 16 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 physically active choices more attractive and less costly for individuals across all those levels, in order to make it competitive with motorized options, can help promote healthier lifestyles. Further research can help determine the extent to which such measures are effective. - 17 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 References Axhausen, Kay W. 2005. “Social networks and travel: some hypotheses.” In Social dimensions of sustainable transport, eds. Kieran P. Donaghy, Stefan Poppelreuter and Georg Rudinger, 90108. Carrasco, Juan Antonio, Bernie Hogan, Barry Wellman, and Eric J. Miller. 2008. "Collecting social network data to study social activitytravel behavior: an egocentric approach." Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 35, no. 6. 961 – 980. Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfeld, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. “The benefits of Facebook “Friends”: social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no.4. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html Frank, Lawrence D., Peter O. Engelke, and Thomas L. Schmid. 2003. Health and Community Design. Washington: Island Press. Frumkin, Howard, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson. 2004. Urban Sprawl and Public Health. Washington: Island Press. Hanson, Susan, and Danielle Fontaine. 2007. “Does instant access promote sedentary behaviour? Putting physical activity on the instant-access-in-cities agenda.” In Socities and cities in the age - 18 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 of instant access, ed. Harvey J. Miller, 87-101. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007. Owen, Neville, Eva Leslie, Jo Salmon, and Michael J. Fotheringham. 2000. “Environmental determinants of physical activity and sedentary behaviour.” Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews 28, no. 4: 153-158. - 19 - Fung; January 2010 PLAN 581 Appendix 1. Behaviour Settings Figure 1. Reproduced from Owen, Neville, Eva Leslie, Jo Salmon, and Michael J. Fotheringham. 2000. “Environmental determinants of physical activity and sedentary behaviour.” Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews 28, no. 4: 153-158. - 20 -