Original articlePhysical Activity Trajectories and Multilevel Factors Among Adolescent Girls
Section snippets
Methods
This study used data from The Trial of Activity in Adolescent Girls 2 (TAAG2) study [11]. TAAG2 was a cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of physical activity in 8th and 11th grade girls who were originally recruited from the University of Maryland TAAG field site. Baseline data for TAAG were collected at six field sites and 36 middle schools (six per field site) across the United States in 2002 (6th grade girls), 2005 (8th grade girls), and 2006 (8th grade girls) [12], [13]. The TAAG2
Results
There were 730 girls who were measured at the University of Maryland field site in 2006. Of these, we recruited and measured 589 (81%) in 2009 when the girls were in 11th grade [32]. Twenty-six girls had insufficient physical activity data and an additional two were missing height or weight data, bringing the sample to 561 participants. As indicated in Figure 1, prevalence of active and inactive categories was similar between 8th and 11th grade.
Table 1 displays the distribution of all
Discussion
Results of this study highlight the complexity of physical activity change trajectories for adolescent girls. Although variables at individual, social, and environmental levels were predictors of active maintainers and inactive maintainers, only individual-level variables predicted adoption. None predicted relapse. Thus, multilevel factors appear to predict behavior maintenance rather than actual change between 8th and 11th grade.
It is notable that, for the most part, the variables predictive
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by R01 HL119058 from the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. We appreciate the willingness of the girls to participate in this research. All coauthors made substantial contributions to the manuscript.
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