Overweight Children and their School Environment - A Small-scale Spatial Approach

摘要

The increasing number of overweight and obese people is a big global problem, as overweight is the activator for many diseases like cardiovascular diseases or diabetes type 2. These non-transmitted diseases can lead to death and have subsequently a great impact on the health budget. Especially the increase of overweight and obese children is alarming. The aim of this project is to apply spatial statistical analysis in combination with Geoinformation Systems (GIS) to analyse if the surroundings of secondary modern schools and places of pupil's residence have an influence on the body weight of secondary modern school children in Villach focusing on fast food outlets in first place, e.g. is there a spatial correlation between a higher amount of fast food outlets and obese children. For the analysis three main datasets are chosen: (i) anonymous data of secondary modern school children holding e.g. information about the Body Mass Index (BMI) and area of residence, (ii) location data (fast food outlets, secondary modern schools and further relevant localities from the Herold business dataset) and (iii) road network data from Tele Atlas. Initial findings show that that the rates of overweight/obese children vary within the schools from 25.7% - 38.1% as well as the number of fast food outlets around schools. Next steps of this project will distribute a questionnaire to secondary school children to gain knowledge about the children's eating habits, activity levels and their attitude of buying food on their way to/from school and home aiming to support our assumptions. In addition further analysis will show if the distance to fast food outlets has an impact on the weight of secondary modern school children and which other environmental factors cause variations respectively to weight, e.g. offer of parks or playgrounds.