COMPARISON OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY LEVELS IN MALE AND FEMALE CHILDREN USING CHRONOLOGICAL AND MATURATIONAL AGES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonly believed that females are less active than their male counterparts during the growth period. Purpose: To determine whether the differences observed in physical activity levels between male and female children are due to maturational differences. METHODS: Participants were 70 males and 68 females from the Saskatchewan Bone Mineral Accrual Study. This was a six year longitudinal study initiated in 1991 that included physical activity measurements every year. There were 4, 3, and 3 physical activity assessments per year in the first three years and 2 assessments per year in the next three years. Physical activity was measured using the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Children (PAQ-C) that uses nine items to measure general physical activity levels during the school year. Physical activity level is represented as a composite score generated from the means of the items. The age of peak height velocity (PHV) was determined by applying a cubic spline fit to growth curves for each participant. Maturational ages were represented as years from PHV. T-tests were used to compare male and female physical activity levels at chronological ages from 9 to 18 years and at maturational ages from -4 to +5 years from PHV. Results: Physical activity significantly decreased (p < 0.05) over time in both genders, by chronological and maturational age. When compared using chronological age, males was significantly more active than females at ages 10 through 16 years (p < 0.05). When aligned using maturational age, there were no significant differences between male and female physical activity levels except at -3 and -1 years from PHV, where males were significantly more active (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The decrease in physical activity over time begins at an earlier chronological age in females. However, when males and females are compared using maturational age, the difference between genders disappears. These results suggest that differences in male and female physical activity levels are in part due to maturational differences and emphasize the importance of controlling for maturation in any study that involves children. Supported by the National Health Research and Development Program
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".