Work Group I: Measures of the Food and Physical Activity Environment: Instruments

Abstract

A work group was convened to identify the core challenges, content gaps, and corresponding possible solutions for improving food- and physical activity–environment instrumentation. Identified challenges included instrument proliferation, the scaling or grain of instruments and appropriate aggregation to the neighborhood or community level, and unknown sensitivity to change of most instruments. Solutions for addressing these challenges included establishing an interactive and real-time instrument repository, developing and enforcing high standards for instrument reporting, increasing community-researcher collaborations, and implementing surveillance of food and physical activity environment. Solid instrumentation will accelerate a better understanding of food- and physical activity–environment effects on eating and physical activity behaviors.

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

—Lord Kelvin