Li Yi, a third-year student in the USC Population, Health and Place Ph.D. program, has published a literature review article on methods for measuring built environment contextual exposure of physical activity in the November 2019 issue of Health and Place.
His article, Methodologies for assessing contextual exposure to the built environment in physical activity studies: A systematic review, provides the first review on integrating Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and accelerometry in studying the effects of built environment on physical activity outcomes. This systematic review aimed to summarize current geospatial methods of assessing contextual exposure to the built environment in these studies. Li reviewed 79 eligible articles to identify the methods and grouped them into three main categories based on similarities in their approaches as follows: domain-based (67% of studies), buffer-based (22%), and activity space-based (11%). His article also considered technical barriers and potential sources of uncertainties in each category and made recommendations for methodological improvements.
Co-authoring the article were John P. Wilson of the USC Spatial Sciences Institute and Tyler B. Mason, Rima Habre, Shirlene Wang, and Genevieve F. Dunton of the USC Department of Preventive Medicine.
