Systematic Review of Childhood Sedentary Behavior Questionnaires: What do We Know and What is Next?

A new systematic review in Sports Medicine has been published on sedentary behaviour questionnaires for children. A brief author summary is found below. A full copy of the paper is available for free via the journal Sports Medicine.

This systematic review provides a summary of studies examining the measurement properties of self-report or proxy-report questionnaires assessing sedentary behavior in children and adolescents. In addition, an overview of the characteristics of the included questionnaires is provided. We performed systematic searches in three online databases: PubMed, EMBASE and SPORTDiscus. Studies had to report on at least one of the measurement properties of a self- or proxy-report questionnaire assessing sedentary behavior in a general population under the age of 18 years. Eventually, our searches resulted in 46 relevant studies on 46 questionnaires. Unfortunately, none of the included questionnaires was considered both valid and reliable, due to the lack of attention for content validity and methodological limitations of the included studies. Therefore, we recommend researchers to adopt standardized tools for the evaluation of measurement properties to improve the methodological quality of future studies and we emphasize the importance of assessing content validity.