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Reliability and validity of the transport and physical activity questionnaire (TPAQ) for assessing physical activity behaviour

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posted on 2015-11-03, 12:52 authored by Emma Adams, Mary Goad, Shannon Sahlqvist, Fiona C. Bull, Ashley R. Cooper, David Ogilvie
Background: 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 ONE

Volume

9

Issue

9

Pages

? - ? (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.0107039

Publisher

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

2014

Notes

© 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

1932-6203

Language

  • en

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