Work

Spatial association of public sports facilities with body mass index in Korea

Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Governments and also local councils create and enforce their own regional public health care plans for the problem of overweight and obesity in the population. Public sports facilities can help these plans. In this paper, we investigated the contribution of public sports facilities to the reduction of the obesity of local residents. We used the data obtained from the Fifth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys; and measured the degree of obesity using body mass index (BMI). We conducted various spatial regression analyses including the global Moran's I test and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation analysis finding that there exists spatial dependence in the error term of spatial regression model for BMI. However, we also observed that the number of local public sports facilities is not significantly related to local BMI. This result can be caused by the low utilization ratio and an unbalanced spatial distribution of local public sports facilities. Based on our findings, we suggest that local councils need to improve the quality of public sports facilities encouraging the establishment of preferred types of pubic sports facilities.
Authors: Eun Jin Han, Kiyeon Kang, So Young Sohn
Institution: Yonsei University
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $808
OpenAlex ID: W2801632595
FWCI: 0.617
Cites: 41
Cited by: 5
Related to: 10