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Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Leisure-time Physical Activity in California: Patterns and Mechanisms

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Abstract

Evidence has shown that racial/ethnic minorities in the United States are less likely than whites to engage in leisure-time physical activity (LTPA); yet few studies to date have included Asian subgroups in the analyses and mechanisms underlying these disparities are not well known. This study uses data from the 2007 California Health Interview Survey (N = 37,164) to examine racial/ethnic disparities in self-reported adherence to LTPA recommendations and to explore the mediating roles of socioeconomic status (SES), acculturation, and neighborhood perceptions. Nine racial/ethnic groups were included: non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Mexicans, and six largest Asian subgroups. Results confirm that racial/ethnic minorities are, in general, less likely than whites to meet LTPA recommendations, whereas heterogeneity is also evident across Asian subgroups. No significant disparity is revealed for the Japanese and Filipinos but whites are advantaged compared to all other Asian groups. Educational attainment, percent of lifetime spent in the United States and access to park, playground, or open space are significantly associated with meeting LTPA recommendations. SES and acculturation play differential roles in explaining group disparities for blacks, Mexicans, and some Asian subgroups. Perceived neighborhood environment does not mediate LTPA disparities by race/ethnicity. Net of these mediators, the advantages of whites in meeting LTPA recommendations persist for blacks, Mexicans, the Chinese, and Koreans. Future research should theorize and operationalize additional multilevel pathways linking race/ethnicity and LTPA while assessing measurement errors in the existing constructs.

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Notes

  1. We conducted sensitivity analyses to examine whether our results would be robust to different measurement of LTPA. We replaced the dichotomous measure of meeting LTPA recommendations with a continuous measure of total minutes of LTPA per week and re-ran all the analyses. The results remained largely unchanged. Considering meeting LTPA recommendations is a qualitatively important outcome given evidence-based public health significance of meeting a certain threshold of LTPA amount on a regular basis (US Department of Health and Human Services 2008), we chose to use the binary measure of LTPA as the outcome variable in our analyses.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partly supported by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awarded to Dr. Ming Wen (R01 CA140319-01A1). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of Population Association of America in 2012 in San Francisco, CA. The authors thank Vincent K. Fu and William A. Smith for their helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Kelin Li.

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Li, K., Wen, M. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Leisure-time Physical Activity in California: Patterns and Mechanisms. Race Soc Probl 5, 147–156 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-013-9087-9

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