Physical Activity and Sport Monitors (population studies)

Printer-friendly version

The Physical Activity and Sport Monitoring Program (PASMP) was initiated by the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute (CFLRI) in 1997 to: 

  • provide evidence to governments in order to establish physical activity targets,
  • monitor progress towards meeting these targets,
  • provide baseline evidence about the prevalence of factors and conditions that influence participation (such as determining Canadians’ views on physical activity and their predisposition to modify their behaviour, social influences within various settings including at home, at school, at work, and in the community, and the availability of infrastructure and a physical environment that supports or hinders physical activity), and,
  • determine the overall impact of strategies and programs to increase physical activity. 

(1)  An annual population based survey. Due to the large number of high priority indicators to assess actions outlined in the 1997 FPT Framework for Action the indicators were organized into theme areas; each survey focuses on a different theme every year and follows a 5 year cycle of collection in order to provide trend information.

These themes include a focus on communication (i.e., factors that would be considered in building a communications strategy such as awareness, knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, intention, and trial behaviours or behavioural changes made to become more active), a focus on local opportunities to be active (i.e., amount of physical activity facilities and opportunities in the community and their usage and satisfaction by the population, program and facility oriented barriers, availability of information about physical activity opportunities, and so on), a focus on children and youth (i.e., availability and satisfaction with of physical education, extracurricular activities at school, opportunities in the community, family participation and support, time spent in active and sedentary pursuits after school, and so on), a focus on the workplace (supportive policies for physical activity at work, availability of facilities at work to be active, other opportunities to be active at or near work, work related benefits of, and barriers to physical activity, and so on), and then a summary year of the most pressing indicators (these key indicators are collected more regularly so that updates are available more frequently than every five years). 

Annual collection of sport indicators. As is the case for physical activity policy, there was a need to consider the factors and conditions influencing sport participation. Indicators for tracking success of sport participation were examined and the data collection harmonized where possible to be conducted in concert with the theme years already established within the program. This enabled both physical activity and sport participation related indicators to be collected during the theme years associated with the focus on communications, focus on local opportunities and focus on children and youth outlined above. In addition adult sport participation was collected during the first two theme years and young people’s sport participation was collected during the latter theme year. As there were additional high priority indicators for sport participation which were not relevant to workplace programming, a separate stand alone sport survey was conducted to gather information on these indicators during the other two theme years of the five year cycle (i.e., the focus on workplace and summary year). Adult sport participation rates are also gathered in this survey (in addition to the theme years related to communication and local opportunities).

Click here for a list of publications