Validity and Reliability of a Self-administered Questionnaire for 24-hour Movement Behaviors

Brief measures of 24-hour movement behaviors are needed to easily evaluate their durations. The present study investigated the criterion validity and test-retest reliability of a brief self-report instrument to assess 24-hour movement behaviors.

A paper-based self-administered questionnaire was used to assess sleep, sedentary behavior (SB), light-intensity physical activity (LPA), and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) with four items in 35 healthy adults. Participants wore a tri-axial accelerometer and answered the questionnaire on the final day of the accelerometry assessment and after 14 days. Spearman's correlations of self-reported measures with their accelerometer-derived counterparts were assessed and median values compared using Mann-Whitney U-tests. Bland-Altman plots were employed to characterize differences in self-reported and device-measured time in the behaviors and their limits of agreement. Test-retest reliability was assessed using Intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs).

Moderate correlations with device measures for sleep, SB, and LPA for a typical and the past week (rho = 0.46 to 0.60, respectively) and low correlations for MVPA (rho = 0.33 to 0.47, respectively) were observed. Less duration of sleep and MVPA were reported compared with accelerometer-derived durations for the three recall periods (z = -3.9 to -2.5 and -4.0 to -3.5, respectively). The test-retest reliability for a typical week was fair-to-good or excellent for all the four behaviors (ICCs = 0.72-0.90).

Findings show acceptable validity and reliability of this questionnaire measure of 24-hour movement behaviors for typical week, past week, and previous day recall periods.