Changes in Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Swedish Repeated Cross-sectional Design Study
Cross-sectional population-based study based on self-reported questionnaires for participants aged 18–79 years, recruited through a survey management service, including 50,000 potential participants. It was a population-based stratified sample, based on sex, age, and regions in Sweden. The first survey was emailed to 2,000 persons on December, 2020. The survey was anonymously completed by 1,035 participants (52%). In addition, in the 2020 survey, the participants were asked to retrospectively self-report the same items about PA and SB during a normal week in December 2019, which was one year before the current time as well as three months before the WHO declared a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Data from 2019 and 2020 have been published by Elvén et al. 2022. The second survey was answered by 1,095 participants in January, 2022.
All participants provided their informed consent to take part in the survey, by answering the web-based questionnaire. The study was conducted according to the Helsinki Declaration and Swedish law. All personal data connections were deleted after the material was collected and were not accessible to the researchers in the present study.
Analyses
Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, using frequencies and percentages for categorical variables and means and standard deviations (SD) for continuous variables. To investigate the changes in PA and SB, a t test and ANOVA and Mann–Whitney U test, Kruskal–Wallis with Scheffe post hoc test, and Spearman’s rho were used to avoid scaling artifacts. The outliers in PA were adjusted by a maximum of 70 hours per week. Line bars illustrated visual changes in PA and SB concerning sex and age. We tested the independent variables sex, age, occupation, life satisfaction, COVID-19 history, health, weight change, and time, and their interactions in relation to the dependent variables PA and SB with univariate analysis of variance. The observed power in the analyses for total PA was above 0.501 and the observed power in the univariate analyses of SB was above 0.607. As the distributions of the dependent variable PA were skewed, interactions for nonparametric tests based on aligned ranks were applied. All tests were two-tailed, and the statistical significance was set at p £ 0.05. All analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 28.0; IBM SPSS, Armonk, NY, USA).
