Is outdoor play in Toronto extinct? Evidence from Project BEAT (Built Environment and Active Transport)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: While US data show the majority of children spend at least 2 hours outdoors each day, little Canadian evidence exists. Concerns over safety restrict outdoor play; these can be tied to the built form and social framework. Where a child lives could impact opportunities for outdoor play. Objective: To examine a) time spent playing outdoors across the school week and weekend and its influence on PA and b) whether associations vary by neighbourhood. Methods: Accelerometry data were collected on 856 children (age = 11.1(0.6) years; boys, n=389; girls, n=467) from 16 Toronto schools that differed according to the built environment (BE; street design and era of development) and socioeconomic status (SES). Four neighbourhood classifications were created (old BE, low-SES; old BE, high-SES; new BE, low-SES; new BE, high-SES). Outdoor play was determined via parental survey. Results: The majority of boys and girls spent 90%) and over the weekend (>65%). Yet those engaged in =2 hours of outdoor play were significantly more active and more likely to meet PA guidelines. For boys outdoor play across the week was positively associated with accelerometer-measured PA; for girls this association was present only for weekend play. Outdoor play time was lower in suburban areas. Conclusions: Playing outdoors is infrequent amongst Toronto children, especially girls, and particularly across the school week and in suburban neighbourhoods.Acknowledgments: This research was funded by the Built Environment, Obesity and Health Strategic Initiative of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".