Reliability and validity of the transport and physical activity questionnaire (TPAQ) for assessing physical activity behaviour..pdf (242.81 kB)
Reliability and validity of the transport and physical activity questionnaire (TPAQ) for assessing physical activity behaviour
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-03, 12:52 authored by Emma Adams, Mary Goad, Shannon Sahlqvist, Fiona C. Bull, Ashley R. Cooper, David OgilvieBackground: No current validated survey instrument allows a comprehensive assessment of both physical activity and
travel behaviours for use in interdisciplinary research on walking and cycling. This study reports on the test-retest reliability
and validity of physical activity measures in the transport and physical activity questionnaire (TPAQ).
Methods: The TPAQ assesses time spent in different domains of physical activity and using different modes of transport for
five journey purposes. Test-retest reliability of eight physical activity summary variables was assessed using intra-class
correlation coefficients (ICC) and Kappa scores for continuous and categorical variables respectively. In a separate study, the
validity of three survey-reported physical activity summary variables was assessed by computing Spearman correlation
coefficients using accelerometer-derived reference measures. The Bland-Altman technique was used to determine the
absolute validity of survey-reported time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA).
Results: In the reliability study, ICC for time spent in different domains of physical activity ranged from fair to substantial for
walking for transport (ICC = 0.59), cycling for transport (ICC = 0.61), walking for recreation (ICC = 0.48), cycling for recreation
(ICC = 0.35), moderate leisure-time physical activity (ICC = 0.47), vigorous leisure-time physical activity (ICC = 0.63), and total
physical activity (ICC = 0.56). The proportion of participants estimated to meet physical activity guidelines showed
acceptable reliability (k = 0.60). In the validity study, comparison of survey-reported and accelerometer-derived time spent in
physical activity showed strong agreement for vigorous physical activity (r = 0.72, p,0.001), fair but non-significant
agreement for moderate physical activity (r = 0.24, p = 0.09) and fair agreement for MVPA (r = 0.27, p = 0.05). Bland-Altman
analysis showed a mean overestimation of MVPA of 87.6 min/week (p = 0.02) (95% limits of agreement 2447.1 to
+622.3 min/week).
Conclusion: The TPAQ provides a more comprehensive assessment of physical activity and travel behaviours and may be
suitable for wider use. Its physical activity summary measures have comparable reliability and validity to those of similar
existing questionnaires.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
PLOS ONEVolume
9Issue
9Pages
? - ? (9)Citation
ADAMS, E.J. ... et al, 2014. Reliability and Validity of the Transport and Physical Activity Questionnaire (TPAQ) for Assessing Physical Activity Behaviour. PLoS ONE, 9 (9), e107039, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107039Publisher
Public Library Science (© 2014 Adams et al.)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
© 2014 Adams et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ISSN
1932-6203Publisher version
Language
- en