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

Submitted: 4 January 2017
Accepted: 14 November 2017
Published: 7 May 2018
Abstract Views: 2046
PDF: 854
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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.

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Supporting Agencies

MOLIT (The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport), Korea

How to Cite

Han, E. J., Kang, K., & Sohn, S. Y. (2018). Spatial association of public sports facilities with body mass index in Korea. Geospatial Health, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/gh.2018.542