Recently I highlighted work of the National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR). a group spearheaded by the National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They have now released a new tool, or rather a registry of measures related to diet and physical activity: http://tools.nccor.org/measures/. I was part of the team on this project. My role was cataloging some of the physical activity measures, a mix of “questionnaires, instruments, diaries, logs, electronic devices, direct observations of people or environments, protocols, and analytic techniques.” Overall there are over 700 measures.
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| Example of Straight Line and Network Buffers Created Using GI |
The main search page at http://tools.nccor.org/measures/ allows users to search by domain (e.g. Individual dietary behavior, food environment…), measure type, age of people measured (though as this information seems to have been unevenly cataloged I found it not so useful for environmental measures), and context or type of place. Measures with reliability and validity information, as well as those used in studies of children and adolescents, were given priority. However, for the domain of physical activity environments this would have limited the measures too much so these are drawn from a wider range of sources.