The health benefits of physical activity for girls and women: Literature review and recommendations for future research and policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are many positive health benefits associated with regular physical activity, and the health risks of inactivity are equally clear. Most of the research on physical activity, however, has been contained within the sport, exercise and recreation disciplines. Studies on the implications of physical activity for disease prevention, management and rehabilitation are increasing but are still limited in number and scope. As well, the relationship between physical activity and the well-being of individuals and communities has not been adequately understood, and the linkages between disease, social and psychological well-being, and physical activity need to be explored more fully. Finally, it has been argued by feminist researchers that the biological, psychological, social and cultural experience of being female in our society has not been adequately addressed in much of the health and exercise literature.\nThis literature review originated from the difficulties policy makers, practitioners, and programmers experienced in accessing diverse sources of research, and the challenges they faced while attempting to make sense of conflicting conclusions. Notwithstanding, the current health and well-being trends in the Canadian population provided an additional imperative for this project. Girls are less active than boys at most ages, women have been experiencing increasing rates of various diseases such as fibromyalgia, coronary heart disease and cancers, and both girls and women experience body image dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and eating disorders at a much higher rate than boys and men. This literature review tackled the complex relationship between health and physical activity in the context of girls and women’s lives through a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach. From this analysis, future research strategies and policy implications to support and improve the health and well-being of girls and women were identified.
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 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 | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".