Background The purpose of this paper is to evaluate self-reported physical activity of young adults using one-week and one-year recall measures with an accelerometer as the criterion measure. Methods Participants were a subsample (N=121, 24+1.7 yrs) from a large longitudinal cohort study. Participants completed a detailed one-year physical activity recall, wore an accelerometer for one week and then completed a brief one-week physical activity recall when they returned the accelerometer. Results Mean values for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) from the three instruments were 3.2, 2.2, and 13.7 hours/wk for the accelerometer, one-week recall, and one-year recall, respectively (all different from each other, pConclusionsBoth recall instruments may be used for ranking physical activity at the group level. At the individual level, the one-week recall performed much better in terms of absolute value of physical activity. The one-year recall overestimated total physical activity but additional research is needed to fully test its validity.
Keywords: physical activity assessment, measurement, motion sensors, instrument psychometrics
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