MVPA Limitations

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Limitations of the study It should be outlined that there were a number of limitations with our study. First of all, not all PA was accounted for as participants were instructed to remove their accelerometer before taking part in any water based or contact sports to avoid damage to the device. The study was limited in terms of sample size, only 87 participants were considered for the study in which only 43 met the inclusion criteria. This reduced the small sample size even further with only a 49% response rate meeting inclusion criteria.

Gender
This study shows that gender plays a major role in physical activity levels of children. It was observed that boys were more physically active than girls and were more likely to meet the recommended …show more content…

Taking this to be an accurate indication of MVPA per day for a similar age group to our study, we can identify Evenson cut points to be more accurate at determining MVPA than Freedson cut points. Using Freedson cut points children accumulated 197.92 minutes of MVPA per day. This number seems unrealistic as it suggests that the participants received more than double the amount of MVPA compared with the study by Trioano, et al (2008). Evenson cut points for MVPA (80.95 minutes per day) on the other hand vary by only 5% to the previously outlined study. According to Trost et al. (2011) Evenson cut points performed well among all child studies and was the only cut points to provide acceptable classification accuracy for all 4 levels of PA. Freedson cut points tend to misclassify light intesity as MVPA, this is because the MVPA threshold for Freedson is much lower than Evenson, therefore placing a higher number of participants in the MVPA …show more content…

The study found similar results to our study where all of the participants met PA guidelines and received abnormally high levels of MVPA. This is because the study used 3 METs to classify MVPA, this an extremely low classification for such an intensity and as a result provided similar results to the Freedson cut points used in our study. Even with the Evenson cut points the MVPA levels were very high. The issue with cut points is not central to child studies alone as it can be seen in similar studies involving all age groups, for example in adult studies there is a lack of methodological agreement for moderate intensity cut points for the Actigraph accelerometer model and this can differ as much as 10-fold across such studies (Mathews

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