Assessing SB as a sum of behaviours and using a previous day recall were the most promising features of existing tools .
Accuracy was poor for all existing tools , with underestimation and overestimation of SB .
There was a lack of evidence about sensitivity to change .
OBJECTIVE Sedentary behaviour ( SB ) has distinct deleterious health outcomes , yet there is no consensus on best practice for measurement .
This study aim ed to identify the optimal self-report tool for population surveillance of SB , using a systematic framework .
Development of a questionnaire to assess sedentary time in older persons – a comparative study using accelerometry
Background There is currently no vali date d question naire available to assess total sedentary time  in older adults . Most studies only used TV viewing time as an indicator of sedentary time . The first aim of our study was to investigate the self-reported time spent by older persons on a set of sedentary activities , and to compare this with objective sedentary time measured by accelerometry . The second aim was to determine what set of self-reported sedentary activities should be used to validly rank people ’s total sedentary time . Finally we tested the reliability of our newly developed question naire using the best performing set of sedentary activities . Methods The study sample included 83 men and women aged 65–92 y , a r and om sample of Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam participants , who completed a question naire including ten sedentary activities and wore an Actigraph GT3X accelerometer for 8 days . Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated to examine the association between self-reported time and objective sedentary time . The test-retest reliability was calculated using the intraclass correlation coefficient ( ICC ) . Results Mean total self-reported sedentary time was 10.4 ( SD 3.5 ) h/d and was not significantly different from mean total objective sedentary time ( 10.2 ( 1.2 ) h/d , p = 0.63 ) . Total self-reported sedentary time on an average day ( sum of ten activities ) correlated moderately ( Spearman ’s r = 0.35 , p < 0.01 ) with total objective sedentary time . The correlation improved when using the sum of six activities ( r = 0.46 , p < 0.01 ) , and was much higher than when using TV watching only ( r = 0.22 , p = 0.05 ) . The test-retest reliability of the sum of six sedentary activities was 0.71 ( 95 % CI 0.57 - 0.81 ) . Conclusions A question naire including six sedentary activities was moderately associated with accelerometry-derived sedentary time and can be used to reliably rank sedentary time in older persons
Assessing SB as a sum of behaviours and using a previous day recall were the most promising features of existing tools .
Accuracy was poor for all existing tools , with underestimation and overestimation of SB .
There was a lack of evidence about sensitivity to change .
OBJECTIVE Sedentary behaviour ( SB ) has distinct deleterious health outcomes , yet there is no consensus on best practice for measurement .
This study aim ed to identify the optimal self-report tool for population surveillance of SB , using a systematic framework .