Behaviour associated with the presence of a school sports ground: Visual information for policy makers

Abstract

The planning and development of sports infrastructure is a complex process that has a broad and long-term impact on health and well-being in communities. It involves many different stake- holders and usually requires significant public or private investments. Its framework is outlined by policies that define the general social goals of such development. To ensure the maximum alignment between the goals and the development activities, it is important to support the policy making process by high-quality information based on real-world data and presented in a clear and focused way. This work introduces a new pipeline of methods for processing and interpretation of data on physical activity and lifestyle in adolescents. The data is extracted from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study and analyzed by modern machine learning methods. We identify behavioural patterns associated with the presence and absence of a school sports ground in different sex and age groups of adolescent in the Czech Republic. The patterns are presented by concise graphical models that ease their use by stake- holders without expert knowledge in sociology, statistics, mathematical modelling, etc. They enable intuitive visual assessment of situation in different regions and highlight the specific similarities and differences among them. Together, the proposed methods contribute towards objective evidence-based policy making in sports management and development.