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Effectiveness of Community Guide Preventive Approaches to Promote Physical Activity in a Midwestern Micropolitan City (309581)

Keywords: physical activity, compositional data analysis

Active Ottumwa is a community-based intervention promoting physical activity among residents of a rural micropolitan community in Iowa. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of this intervention via quantifying the changes in physical activity (PA) between before and after the intervention. PA data are categorized as daily time spent on either moderate-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity (LPA), or sedentary activity (SA). Using a compositional data analysis approach, we obtain compositional slopes and apply the centered log-ratio (clr) transformation. We fit a multivariate analysis of covariance model using demographic variables and clr-transformed baseline compositions to predict the clr-transformed compositional slopes. Accounting for demographics and baseline compositions, we find a significant decrease in SA and increase in LPA in the population after the 24th month of the intervention.