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Lecture Notes

Because we know that physical activity is such an important behavior for health, it's also important to know how to measure physical activity. How do we know if people are achieving the right amounts or enough physical activity to promote health? Well we're going to talk about four different ways that we measure physical activity, the most common ways that physical activity is measured, and the first one here is self-report, simply asking people to report, usually on a paper-based questionnaire, how much in terms of how often, how intense or how long people participate in physical activity. The good things about this are that it's non-invasive, meaning that you don't have to sample blood or ask them to wear a particular unit or ask people to be monitored for the whole day; it's very non-invasive. You can do it very quickly, and it's very cost effective. So oftentimes when you see really big studies of physical activities, these self-report measures are included because it's really cost effective; you can ask a lot of people some questions about their physical activity in a very cost-effective manner. The bad thing can be that people often over-report. Because people know that physical activity is a good behavior, it's something positive, it's something they should be doing, oftentimes people bump up their numbers a little bit, if you will.