Gender and age differences in walking for transport and recreation: Are the relationships the same in all neighborhoods?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Walking as regular physical activity (PA) is central to healthy aging, and environments influence walking. Multilevel neighborhood-based studies that only report average (fixed-effect) walking differences for gender and age implicitly assume that neighborhood environments influence the walking behavior of men and women, and younger and older persons, similarly. This study tests this assumption by examining whether gender and age differences in walking for transport (WfT) and walking for recreation (WfR) are similar or different across neighborhoods. METHODS: This paper used data from the HABITAT multilevel study, with 7,866 participants aged 42-68 years in 2009 living in 200 ne..