Health Literacy, Sociodemographic Factors, and Physical Activity: Evidence From Cross-Sectional Quantile Estimations

Purpose: Physical inactivity is responsible for various health issues. This study represents an early attempt to examine how health literacy and sociodemographic factors are associated with physical activity across different quantiles of time spent in physical activity. Method: Data obtained from the Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Survey 2019 were analyzed. A quantile regression model was utilized to estimate the differentials in time spent on physical activity across different health literacy levels and sociodemographic groups at the 0.1,0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 0.9 quantiles of physical activity. Results: Individuals with excellent health literacy spent more time in physical activity at all the quantiles than those with limited health literacy. Men spent less time in physical activity than women when they were inactive but spent more when they allocated a large amount of time to physical activity. The effects of income and education level on time spent in physical activity were negative but only significant at the high quantiles. The differentials attributed to employment status and house locality were bigger among adults who spent more time in physical activity. Single adults spent less time in physical activity than the married across all the quantiles, but the relationship between widowed or divorced status and physical activity was only seen in the top 10% and 25% brackets. Conclusion: Findings of this study ascertain the focus groups based on not only the health literacy and sociodemographic factors, but also the distributional effects of time spent on physical activity for the formulation of intervention measures.