BackgroundRegular physical activity decreases the risk for numerous non-communicable diseases. The World Health Organization has suggested physical activity (PA) guidelines that, based on previous research, would provide health benefits to those who comply. The first guideline for health benefits suggests 150 min of moderate PA or equivalent per week. The guideline for additional health benefits suggests 300 min of PA or equivalent per week. The objective of this paper is to analyze to what extent these two WHO PA guidelines for adults are met in the Belgian region of Flanders. Furthermore, we are interested to see which groups are more or less likely to meet the PA guidelines.MethodsCrosstables and logistic regressions are used on a sample of 3028 adults in the Belgian region of Flanders. All respondents filled in a 7-day time-diary in which they continuously recorded all their activities.ResultsFirstly, men are more likely than women to comply to both PA guidelines. Secondly, living with a partner increases the odds to comply to the guidelines. For men, this is the case for both guidelines, while for women, this only applies to the first guideline. Thirdly, women with a young child have lower odds to comply to the guidelines, while having a young child doesn’t have an effect for men.ConclusionPrevious research on meeting PA guidelines in Flanders shows diverging results. Time-diary data allows researchers to strictly follow the WHO definition when operationalizing compliance to PA guidelines. There is a need for future research that combines time-diaries with a PA questionnaire and accelerometer data to gain more insights on the benefits and pitfalls of both methodologies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13690-019-0341-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
In 2019, Femma vzw, a Belgian women’s organisation, as an experiment, implemented a 30-hour workweek within the organisation. For a period of 12 months, all full-time employees switched from a 36-hour workweek to a 30-hour workweek. During this experiment, a longitudinal time-use study into the impact of the working time reduction on the working life and private life of these employees was carried out. The study included five waves of data collection before, during and after the experiment over a period of two and a half years. Each wave consisted of an online 7-day time use diary, a pre-diary questionnaire and a post-diary questionnaire. This research report discusses the first general findings of the study, using the first four waves. Some key findings are: the employees had clear wishes and expectations about what they wanted to do with their extra time at the start of the 30-hour workweek. Above all, the wish for more personal time was high. Most employees took this extra time as one additional non-working day per week, namely Wednesday or Friday. The extra free hours mostly were spent on household work, care and personal care, although this was not exactly what they wished for. However, employees did experience less household stress, less leisure time pressure and a better work-life balance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.