Attaching metabolic expenditures to standard occupational classification systems: perspectives from time-use research

Abstract

BackgroundTraditionally, time-use data have been used to inform a broad range of economic and sociological research topics. One of the new areas in time-use research is the study of physical activity (PA) and physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE). Time-use data can be used to study PAEE by assigning MET values to daily activities using the Ainsworth Compendium of Physical Activities. Although most diarists record their daily activities accurately and in detail, they are only required to record their paid working hours, not the job-specific tasks they undertake. This makes it difficult to assign MET values to paid work episodes.MethodsIn this methodological paper, we explain how we addressed this problem by using the detailed information about respondents’ occupational status included in time-use survey household and individual questionnaires. We used the 2008 ISCO manual, a lexicon of the International Labour Organization of occupational titles and their related job-specific tasks. We first assigned a MET value to job-specific tasks using the Ainsworth compendium (2011) then calculated MET values for each of the 436 occupations in the ISCO-08 manual by averaging all job-specific MET values for each occupation.ResultsThe ISCO-08 Major Groups of ‘elementary occupations’ and ‘craft and related trades workers’ are associated with high PAEE variation in terms of their job-specific MET values and together represented 21.6% of the Belgian working population in 2013. We recommend that these occupational categories should be prioritised for further in-depth research into occupational activity (OA).ConclusionsWe developed a clear and replicable procedure to calculate occupational activity for all ISCO-08 occupations. All of our calculations are attached to this manuscript which other researchers may use, replicate and refine.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-017-4546-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Trends and correlates of meeting 24-hour movement guidelines: a 15-year study among 167,577 Thai adults

“…Instead, the reported occupational and travel-related activities were linked with additional information on occupations and location or mode of travel of respondents available in the household questionnaires, according to the procedures suggested in previous studies [41,64,65]. The occupations of respondents were linked with a summary MET previously assigned to the occupation list of 2008 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08) [66]. For travel-related codes, the location or mode of travel of respondents was linked with a summary MET assigned to travelling modes available in a previous study [65].…”

Visualizing Physical Activity Patterns among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Pilot Study

“…Time-use perspectives represents a promising approach in the study of physical activity and energy expenditure [31,32,33], especially as it appears to be more valid for non-occupational populations surveillance compared to more traditional self-reported assessments [34]. The Ainsworth Compendium of Physical Activities [35] is a well-known and documented approach to allocate metabolic equivalents (METS) to different types of activities.…”

Assessing changes in some facial signs of fatigue in Chinese women, induced by a single working day

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