Access to public spaces and physical activity for Mexican adult women

The aim of this article was to explore the association between access to public spaces and physical activity for adult women, controlling and testing interactions with sociodemographic and public spaces characteristics. We combined sociodemographic data from a survey with the adult (18-65 years of age) women population of Tijuana, Mexico, conducted in 2014 (N = 2,345); with data from a 2013 study on public spaces in the same city. We evaluated access to public spaces by the presence and total area of public spaces in buffers of 400, 800, 1,000 and 1,600m around the participants’ homes. We measured physical activity with the short version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ-short). We employed multinomial logistic models to evaluate the association between access to public spaces and physical activity, and tested for interactions between access to public spaces and public spaces quality and sociodemographic characteristics. We observed no interaction between access to public spaces and public spaces quality in their effect on physical activity. There was an association between the presence of public spaces in the 400m buffer, and higher odds of being in the low physical activity level (as opposed to being in the moderate level) (coefficient: 0.50; 95%CI: 0.13; 0.87). Participants who used public transport were less likely to be in the low physical activity level (coefficient: -0.57; 95%CI: -0.97; -0.17). We suggest that, in this population, the access to public spaces might be less relevant for physical activity than other elements of the urban environment and sociodemographic characteristics