N C H S - N H I S - Physical Activity History

National Health Interview
Survey (NHIS)
Celebrating the First 50 years:
1957-2007

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports was created in 1956 to promote awareness of the health importance of exercise and physical fitness (1).

The International Symposium on Physical Activity and Cardiovascular Health was held in Toronto in 1966 (5).

The National Health Interview Survey introduced questions on exercise and physical activity in 1975 and shortly thereafter became one of the major surveillance tools for monitoring changes in the prevalence of physical activity among U.S. adults.

Selected milestones in physical activity research, promotion and surveillance over the past 50 years provide context for understanding the evolution of physical activity measurement in the National Health Interview Survey. The following surveys served as the foundation for the early work of the NHIS in the study of physical activity:

In the 1950s, the Tecumseh Community Health Study, a comprehensive health study of residents of Tecumseh, Michigan, used a highly structured questionnaire that asked an extensive set of questions about physical activity including intensity, frequency and duration of activities (expressed in terms of hours per week), averaged over one year (2), (3).

In the 1960s, a community-based study entitled “Health and Ways of Living,” conducted in Alameda County, California, included questions on a limited number of physical activities in a self-administered questionnaire (4). The physical activity questions were introduced by a phrase indicating that the respondent was being asked about things people do in their “free time” --- the precursor to the widely used concept of “leisure-time physical activity.” The Alameda Study questionnaire also included the question “Are you more physically active or less active than most people your age?” ---which first appeared in the NHIS in 1975 and continued periodically throughout the following 25 years.

In the 1970s, the Minnesota Leisure Time Activity (LTA) questionnaire was developed for use in a structured interview setting (6). The Minnesota LTA questionnaire asked about participation in specific physical activities or exercises during the last 12 months. For each activity reported, respondents were asked to identify the month(s) in which they engaged in the activity, the number of times per month, and the duration per occasion. Intensity codes were assigned for each activity, an approach adopted by the NHIS in the 1980s.