ESRC-Seminar Series Physical activity, the built environment and obesity

Seminar 3: Physical activity, the built environment and obesity

Date: Tuesday 30 October 2007

Time: 10.00am – 4.00pm

Booking forms for this seminar will be available here from Monday 24th
September 2007

Venue: Chandos House, 2 Queen Anne Street, London W1G 9LQ

Programme

Confirmed speakers
Billie Giles-Corti (The University of Western Australia)
Kim Proctor & Dianna Smith (University of Leeds)
Martin White (Newcastle University)
Members of the CASA team (University College London)
Brian Saelens (University of Washington)

Despite much theorising about the environmental pathways for obesity,
studies that directly link these hypothesised determinants with measures
of obesity are rare. The lack of work in this area is partly a function
of the inherent methodological and analytical challenges in undertaking
primary studies, and it is no surprise that such work in this field has
produced conflicting findings. Studies have not typically used directly
measured features of the environment relevant for obesity, but have
relied on 'off-the-shelf' proxies such as area deprivation to
distinguish between different social and physical environments. Other
studies have relied on self-reported perceptions of local environmental
conditions, but a consistent lack of correlation between objective and
subjective views of the same environments has been demonstrated. This
seminar brings together presentations on recent innovations in study
design and method used by researchers overseas and in the UK, and will
stimulate discussion about how best to operationalise, measure, generate
and analyse high quality proximal and distal environmental data. A
variety of techniques will be covered, such as direct environmental
audit and the exploitation of routine official, commercial and
administrative data. The possibilities offered by recent advances in GIS
techniques in generating environmental data will also be discussed.


Programme
10.00 Registration
10.40
Welcome
10.45
Billie Giles-Corti
School of Population Health, The University of Western Australia
11.30 Kim Proctor & Dianna Smith
School of Geography, University of Leeds
12.15
Lunch
13.00 Martin White
Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University
13.45 CASA team
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London
14.30 Tea
15.00 Brian Saelens
Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center, University of Washington
15.45 Panel discussion
16.00 Close