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The Local Food Environment Of Children In London Ontario: A Methodological Comparison, Claudia Rangel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present study examined current methodological approaches to characterize the local food environment around children in London, Ontario, assessing variations in BMI and dietary preferences in relation to the choice of food environment measure. Taking advantage of a unique dataset that collected GPS trajectories of children’s schools and homes for a large sample of children between 11 and 14 years of age, two commonly-used approaches (i.e., network buffers and Euclidean buffers), and two novel measures of activity spaces (i.e., standard deviational ellipses and α-hulls) are used as ‘geographic containers’ (i.e., areal units) to derive food outlet measures. Results showed slight …