A Longitudinal Analysis of the Influence of the Neighborhood Environment on Recreational Walking within the Neighborhood: Results from RESIDE

Hayley Christian, Matthew Knuiman, Mark Divitini, Sarah Foster, Paula Hooper, Bryan Boruff, Fiona Bull, Billie Giles-Corti

There is limited longitudinal evidence confirming the role of neighborhood environment attributes in encouraging people to walk more or if active people simply choose to live in activity-friendly neighborhoods. Natural experiments of policy changes to create more walkable communities provide stronger evidence for a causal effect of neighborhood environments on residents' walking. We aimed to investigate longitudinal associations between objective and perceived neighborhood environment measures and neighborhood recreational walking. We analyzed longitudinal data collected over 8 yr (four surveys) from the RESIDential Environments (RESIDE) Study (Perth, Australia, 2003-2012). At each time point, participants reported the frequency and total minutes of recreational walking/week within their neighborhood and neighborhood environment perceptions. Objective measures of the neighborhood environment were generated using a Geographic Information System (GIS). Local recreational walking was influenced by objectively measured access to a medium-/large-size park, beach access, and higher street connectivity, which was reduced when adjusted for neighborhood perceptions. In adjusted models, positive perceptions of access to a park and beach, higher street connectivity, neighborhood esthetics, and safety from crime were independent determinants of increased neighborhood recreational walking. Local recreational walking increased by 9 min/wk (12% increase in frequency) for each additional perceived neighborhood attribute present. Our findings provide urban planners and policy makers with stronger causal evidence of the positive impact of well-connected neighborhoods and access to local parks of varying sizes on local residents' recreational walking and health. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP823.