Research

CPAH is involved in the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), which is an international collaboration to develop and test a self report physical activity instrument. During 2000 and 2001 a group of scientists from many countries participated in a reliability and validity study of the IPAQ short and long questionnaires and demonstrated that these two instruments had reasonable repeatability against each other, test re-test reproducibility and validity against an accelerometer.

The host site for the IPAQ project is at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in Sweden, but CPAH will act as the Data Management Centre for some of this international IPAQ collaborative work.

The International Physical Activity Survey (IPAS) is a collaborative exercise to conduct a physical activity prevalence study in 20 countries during 2002 - 2004 using the reliable and valid IPAQ short instrument. 20 countries completed prevalence studies during this time period in representative population samples or in national samples. Data are being analysed at present.

CPAH will act as the Data Management Centre, co-ordinating and analysing the data from these countries and writing a combined IPAS report. CPAH will do this on behalf of a group of scientists who are running IPAQ. Further details about the IPAQ questionnaire can be obtained at the website based at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The results of the international prevalence study will be available at the end of 2003, and will be presented at various scientific meetings in 2004.