Residential Environment and Walking Behavior in Hong Kong Older Adults – A multi-level longitudinal study

In tackling the issues arising from ageing population, the Hong Kong Government initiates age-friendly environment to promote active ageing. Older adults, however, is inactive in HK. Among different types of physical activity (PA), walking is easier to promote in older adults because it is safe, accessible, and easy to incorporate with daily routine (Yang, Sahlqvist, McMinn, Griffin, & Ogilvie, 2010).

A substantial literature has been developed on the linkage between physical environment and walking (Cerin et al., 2013). However, research that links social environment to PA orwalking is sparse. Increasing but still few studies suggest that social environment is critical to disentangle the causal mechanism between physical/social environment and walking. Limitations were identified in the existing studies (Clark & Scott, 2013; Van Cauwenberg et al., 2011). They were i) conducted in low-density urbanized western countries; ii) relied on solely objective or subjective measurements of physical environment and walking; iii) moderators or mediators were seldom studied; iv) few research was done in older population; and v) small sample size of studies in social environment – PA associations. In 2015, the investigators of this proposal received funding from Public Policy Research (PPR) Fund on a project “Impacts of the Residential Physical and Social Environment on Daily Walking Behavior of Older Adults in Hong Kong” (See Appendix 2). This PPR project is a multilevel study with aims to examine a) the associations between walking, and physical and social environments among older adults in Hong Kong; and b) how genders moderate these environment-walking associations.

Owing to the funding nature, this PPR project is a one-year cross-sectional study, which does not support for causality of results. Hence, the research team proposes this GRF project to extend the work of PPR project with aims to examine 1) the change of associations between physical environment, social environment and walking among older adults in a 3-year time period; and 2) the change of associations in relation to different socioeconomic statuses. Such longitudinal study could further demonstrate cause-effect relationships and lay the groundwork for developing future intervention. The data of the existing PPR project (2015-2016) will be used as baseline data for this proposed GRF project (2016-2018). The older adults recruited in the PPR project will be used for the 2nd/ 3rd measures in this GRF project. Multilevel longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple-group SEM will be conducted to answer questions 1 and 2 as mentioned above, respectively.