ArticleThe international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity2015
Categorisation of built environment characteristics: the trouble with tertiles.
Article in The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations between parental perceptions of neighbourhood environment and physical activity in children and adolescents: a systematic review including 149 studies.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Pooled it
- Built environmental correlates of older adults' total physical activity and walking: a systematic review and meta-analysis.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2017Pooled it
- The neighbourhood physical environment and active travel in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2017Pooled it
- The association between built environment features and physical activity in the Australian context: a synthesis of the literature.BMC public health · 2016Pooled it
- Missing Link between Glycemic Control and Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis.Internal medicine (Tokyo, Japan) · 2026Article
- The mediating role of step counts in the relationship between diverse neighbourhood destinations and older adults' physical function.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- What is the cross-sectional association of geospatially derived walkability with walking for leisure and transport?PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- The Association between Fast Food Outlets and Overweight in Adolescents Is Confounded by Neighbourhood Deprivation: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- The good, the bad, and the environment: developing an area-based measure of access to health-promoting and health-constraining environments in New Zealand.International journal of health geographics · 2021Article
- The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2020Article
- Walkability and its association with prevalent and incident diabetes among adults in different regions of Germany: results of pooled data from five German cohorts.BMC endocrine disorders · 2020Article
- Comparing Different Residential Neighborhood Definitions and the Association Between Density of Restaurants and Home Cooking Among Dutch Adults.Nutrients · 2019Article
- The Urban Liveability Index: developing a policy-relevant urban liveability composite measure and evaluating associations with transport mode choice.International journal of health geographics · 2019Article
- Associations of socio-demographic, perceived environmental, social and psychological factors with active travel in Hong Kong adolescents: the iHealt(H) cross-sectional study.Journal of transport & health · 2019Article
- Associations between home and school neighbourhood food environments and adolescents' fast-food and sugar-sweetened beverage intakes: findings from the Olympic Regeneration in East London (ORiEL) Study.Public health nutrition · 2018Article
- Statistical Approaches Used to Assess the Equity of Access to Food Outlets: A Systematic Review.AIMS public health · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundIn the analysis of the effect of built environment features on health, it is common for researchers to categorise built environment exposure variables based on arbitrary percentile cut-points, such as median or tertile splits. This arbitrary categorisation leads to a loss of information and a lack of comparability between studies since the choice of cut-point is based on the sample distribution. DISCUSSION: In this paper, we highlight the various drawbacks of adopting percentile categorisation of exposure variables. Using data from the SocioEconomic Status and Activity in Women (SESAW) study from Melbourne, Australia, we highlight alternative approaches which may be used instead of percentile categorisation in order to assess built environment effects on health. We discuss these approaches using an example which examines the association between the number of accessible supermarkets and body mass index. We show that alternative approaches to percentile categorisation, such as transformations of the exposure variable or factorial polynomials, can be implemented easily using standard statistical software packages. These procedures utilise all of the available information available in the data, avoiding a loss of power as experienced when categorisation is adopted.We argue that researchers should retain all available information by using the continuous exposure, adopting transformations where necessary.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.