Overestimation of physical activity among young people: Does age and gender play a role?

Background and purpose: Due to the continuous decrease of physical activity (PA) of people in industrialized countries (Kohl et al., 2012), PA behavior and its psychological foundations has become a key issue in health-related research. Studies show that most people tend to overesti-mate their habitual PA (Skender et al., 2016), however, there is very little research on the role of demographic variables in this respect. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine whether age and/or gender affect the (over)estimation of PA among children and adolescents.
Methods: Data of 75 students (38 girls and 37 boys, 10 to 18 years) of various primary and sec-ondary schools were randomly included in the study. Habitual PA was assessed through an online self-report questionnaire (Schmidt et al., 2017) as well as by wearing an accelerometer (Acti-Graph GT3X-BT) over seven consecutive days. A multiple regression analysis was used to ana-lyze the impact of age and gender on the accuracy of PA estimation.
Results: The students reported being active for at least 60 minutes on average on 4,0 ± 2,1 days per week, whereas the accelerometer data verify only 1,8 ± 1,6 days per week. Thus, a majority of 76% of the children and adolescents overestimated and 9% underestimated their PA. Almost 15% were correct in their PA estimation. However, results of the regression analysis indicate neither an effect of age ( = .003, p > .1) nor of gender ( = -.070, p > .1).
Conclusions: Overestimation of PA is common not only among adults but also among children and adolescents. However, this misperception appears to be independent of age and gender, at least in the age group considered here. Future studies should examine further demographic and psychological variables in order to explain why most of the people significantly overestimate their habitual PA.