Year: 2004
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: For many decades, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had highlighted the growing importance of chronic non-communicable diseases in developed and developing countries, with an increase in lifestyle-related diseases.Physical inactivity has been identified as one of the risk factors, in addition to other leading risk factors like diet, and the use of tobacco and alcohol, contributing to the occurrence of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular diseases, cancers, obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus.Based on the researcher's observations while living in Belhar community for more than ten years, it was hypothesized that the level of physical inactivity among adolescents could become a public health problem in the future if not addressed immediately.Therefore, the study aimed to assess the daily habitual physical activity patterns of learners in the four high schools in the Belhar community through a 24-hour recall over a period of 7 consecutive days.This was used to determine the physical activity levels of the learners.In addition, the study assessed some of the components of health-related fitness of the learners.The study also explored the views of the learners on their participation in physical activities.The whole study was divided into 4 parts involving qualitative and quantitative research procedures.The study population for both the qualitative and quantitative studies was made up of the four high schools in the Belhar community.The crosssectional data of physical activity levels showed that about 32% of the high school learners(n=951) in this community were physically inactive.In most of the vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to thank God for his continuous mercy and blessings throughout the past four years.I would like to thank my supervisors for their guidance, support, encouragement and commitment over the past four years.The e-mails with just a few encouraging words helped me over those bad patches.A special word of thanks to Dr Lalloo and Professor van den Auweele who assisted with the statistical and focus group analysis.Thank you to Ella Belcher for the final editing of this document and others like Ms Williams who read through to ensure that the document has a clear message.I am also highly indebted to the learners who participated in the study, without them this study would not have been possible.I extend my sincere thanks to my research assistant, Ms Davids who helped keep order amidst the chaos and helped make my dream come true, thank you.To my colleagues, I want to motivate and encourage you to continue the battle and thank you for the encouragement on a Wednesday afternoon.To my parents and
Author: José Frantz
Language: English
Topic: Physical Activity and Health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Ministry of Health, New Zealand
OpenAlex ID: W1517169406