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Record W7116661915 · doi:10.1123/jpah.2025-0391

Association Between Active Outdoor Play and Health Among Children, Adolescents, and Adults: An Umbrella Review

2025· article· en· W7116661915 on OpenAlexafffund
Louise de Lannoy, Maeghan E. James, Zainab Badruddin, Anujah Thankarajah, Peter Bakalár, Lisa M. Barnett, Peter Bentsen, Javier Brazo-Sayavera, Valerie Carson, Michael J.A. Down, Scott Duncan, Ryan Fahey, Nevin J. Harper, Avril Johnstone, Justin J. Lang, Richard Larouche, Taru Manyanga, Ashley McCurdy, Arlene M. McGarty, Lærke Mygind, Stéphanie A. Prince, Alessandra Prioreschi, Suryeon Ryu, Lindsey Sikora, Patricia Tucker, Leigh M. Vanderloo, Lucy-Joy Wachira, Mark S. Tremblay

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Physical Activity and Health · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicOutdoor and Experiential Education
Canadian institutionsImpactWestern UniversityUniversity of Northern British ColumbiaQueen's UniversityUniversity of OttawaPublic Health Agency of CanadaUniversity of AlbertaChildren’s Health Research InstituteUniversity of GuelphUniversity of LethbridgeUniversity of VictoriaChildren's Hospital of Eastern OntarioLakehead UniversityHealth Canada
FundersMedical Research CouncilLawson Foundation
KeywordsAssociation (psychology)Mental healthPublic healthPhysical activityOccupational safety and healthHealth benefitsSuicide prevention

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: This umbrella review examined the associations between active outdoor play (AOP) and physical, mental, social, and spiritual health across all ages. METHODS: A systematic search of 8 bibliographic databases was conducted to identify quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining associations between AOP and human physical, social, mental, and spiritual health. Included reviews were written in English or French and published in or after 2014. Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews 2 was used to assess the quality of reviews. Quantitative findings on statistical observations of null, favorable, and unfavorable findings were used to assess the consistency of evidence. Bradford Hill's criteria was used to assess causality. RESULTS: Six systematic reviews-3 quantitative, 2 mixed-methods, and 1 qualitative-were included in the umbrella review, encompassing 381 articles. Four and 2 reviews were assessed as critically low and high quality, respectively. For physical, social, and spiritual health, 78% (7/9 observations, 2 reviews), 72% (13/18 observations, 3 reviews), and 100% (9/9 observations, 1 review) showed that AOP was favorably associated with the respective health outcomes based on children and adolescent studies exclusively. By contrast, 71% (53/75 observations, 4 reviews) showed that AOP was favorably associated with mental health inclusive of all ages. There was partial support for causality between AOP and all health outcomes. A figure was created to illustrate possible pathways from AOP to health outcomes. CONCLUSION: Largely positive associations were observed between AOP and physical, social, mental, and spiritual health, especially among children and adolescents. The greatest source of favorable evidence across all ages was on AOP and mental health, highlighting benefits for public health.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.585
Threshold uncertainty score0.471

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.417
Teacher spread0.386 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

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