Study suggests TV watching lowers physical activity

By John M Grohol PsyD
July 28, 2006

Not surprising to any American, when you watch TV, you aren’t as active and the more you watch, the less active you become. I honestly thought this was common knowledge, but apparently we needed to confirm this in research to ensure our perception in this area was actually true. Glad to see taxpayer money (the study was partially funded by the National Cancer Institute) put to good use.

Going forward, “we need to do a better job of understanding the factors that lead people to be physically active,” Bennett (a study author) said. “This is an important area of research, particularly because the impact of physical inactivity disproportionately affects the health of lower income Americans.

Physical inactivity seems to be an affect of most Americans, with all the obesity research and studies that show Americans are “overweight.” The fact that people with less resources, less money, and less motivation are more likely to be inactive is not really an area that seems to be crying for research, because it is a self-evident problem. Give someone an opportunity, a chance to improve their lives, and something that motivates them to get up in the morning (poor or not), and guess what? They’ll be more active, more motivated, and work toward the goal you’ve showed them they might achieve. When you take away all possibilities of a goal (as many people in lower socioeconomic classes feel, regardless of the truth), well, gee, I wouldn’t see much point in prying myself away from the television either.

A study of low-income housing residents has documented that the more television people say they watched, the less active they were, researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and colleagues report.

The findings of television’s effects on physical activity are the first to be based on objective measurements using pedometers, rather than the study subjects’ memories of their physical activity, say the researchers. The study will be published online by the American Journal of Public Health on July 27 and later in the journal’s September 2006 issue.

“Clearly the more time a person spends watching television the less time they have to be physically active, and in many lower income communities, other factors might have influenced the study participants’ decisions to spend time watching television,” said the paper’s lead author, Gary Bennett, PhD, of Dana-Farber’s Center for Community-Based Research and the Harvard School of Public Health.

These factors may include fear of street crime and poor maintenance of parks and playground equipment, which create barriers to outdoor activities. Older people were particularly prone to staying indoors and watching television, which reflects their increasing isolation in society today, Bennett said.

The study involved 486 low-income housing residents in Boston. The study participants tended to be black or Hispanic, older, and female. Two-thirds were overweight or obese, 37 percent had less than a high-school education.

To avoid the potential inaccuracies associated with self-reported physical activity, the researchers arranged to have the study participants wear pedometers during their waking hours to count the number of steps they took every day for five days. The pedometers were “blinded” to prevent the participants from knowing how many steps they had taken and possibly altering their normal patterns of activity. The participants also reported the number of hours they watched television.

Results showed that the participants watched an average of 3.6 hours a day of television, with some reporting spending no time watching television while others watched as much as 14.5 hours on weekdays and 19 hours on weekend days.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.