Climate Change Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Climate Change, including details on causes, effects, impact, facts, myths, information. | ||||||||
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An uphill struggle: Effects of a point-of-choice stair climbing intervention in a non-English speaking population.Eves FF, Masters RS School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK. BACKGROUND: Increases in lifestyle physical activity are a current public health target. Interventions that encourage pedestrians to choose the stairs rather than the escalator are uniformly successful in English speaking populations. Here we report the first test of a similar intervention in a non-English speaking sample, namely the Hong Kong Chinese. METHODS: Travellers on the Mid-Levels escalator system in Hong Kong were encouraged to take the stairs for their health by a point-of-choice prompt with text in Chinese positioned at the junction between the stairs and the travelator. Gender, age, ethnic origin, and walking on the travelator were coded by observers. A 2 week intervention period followed 2 weeks of baseline monitoring with 57 801 choices coded. Specificity of the intervention was determined by contrasting effects in Asian and non-Asian travellers. RESULTS: There was no effect of the intervention on stair climbing and baseline rates (0.4%) were much lower than previous studies in Western populations (5.4%). Nonetheless, a modest increase in walking up the travelator, confined to the Asian population (OR = 1.12), confirmed that the intervention materials could change behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: It would be unwise to assume that lifestyle physical activity interventions have universal application. The contexts in which the behaviours occur, e.g. climate, may act as a barrier to successful behaviour change. Published 20 October 2006 in Int J Epidemiol, 35(5): 1286-90.
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