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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".