More of the same or a change of scenery: an observational study of variety and frequency of physical activity in British children

Table 2 Variety and Frequency of activities stratified by population subgroups

	Variety		Frequency
	Mean ± sd	P-value	Mean ± sd	P-value
Overall	10.8 ± 5.0		24.2 ± 15.0
Most vs. Least active*
Bottom 10%	9.9 ± 4.7	Ref	21.0 ±12.7	Ref
Top 10%	11.7 ± 5.2	0.002	27.2 ± 14.8	<0.001
Sex
Boys	10.4 ± 5.2	Ref	23.8 ±15.0	Ref
Girls	11.1 ± 4.9	0.011	24.6 ±15.0	0.299
Location†
Rural	10.5 ± 4.7	Ref	23.4 ± 13.8	Ref
Suburban	11.1 ± 5.3	0.098	24.7 ± 15.6	0.155
Urban	10.8 ± 5.1	0.593	22.5 ± 14.0	0.413
Weight status
Non-overweight	10.8 ± 5.1	Ref	24.1 ± 15.2	Ref
Overweight/obese	10.8 ± 4.6	0.893	24.6 ± 14.6	0.522
Activity status
Not meeting government PA guidelines	10.4 ± 4.8	Ref	22.8 ± 14.4	Ref
Meeting government PA guidelines	11.0 ± 5.1	0.048	24.8 ± 15.3	0.009
Parent/guardian education level
GCSE or lower	10.8 ± 5.0	Ref	24.5 ± 15.0	Ref
A-level or lower vocational	10.9 ± 5.2	0.710	24.8 ± 15.5	0.737
University degree or higher vocational	10.4 ± 4.7	0.210	22.5 ± 14.0	0.047

Data are presented as mean ± standard deviation.
Ref is the reference category.
Differences in Variety or Frequency between population strata (p–values presented in Table 2) were tested for using multilevel linear regression.
*comparison between the most (top 10% n = 170) and least (bottom 10% n = 170) active children based on number of minutes spent in MVPA.
†31 participants included in the main analysis had missing data for location, the descriptive characteristics presented in Table 2 for location are based on the 1669 participants (936 girls, 733 boys) with data available.
PA physical activity, GCSE general certificate of secondary education.

ISSN: 1471-2458