Children's Indoor Leisure Activities in France: Time Budget Data for Indoor Air Risk Assessment

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study was to determine the time spent by children (0– 18 years old) in indoor places of leisure and also day-care centers. The sampling scheme was stratified by geographic region and size of town. This study was performed from September 2005 to March 2006. Families were asked to complete a diary by phone on their children's activities during the last week of school and the last week of a vacation period. The time spent in each place was then extrapolated for the winter period. We then evaluated the overall attendance and time (means and quartiles) spent by all of the children, and by those of children attending places. Information was collected on 2780 children. Gymnasiums were frequented the most (52.3% during the winter period) and were the places in which children spend the greatest amount of time (average: 19 min/day). Other places frequented the most included bars/restaurants (46.5%; average: 9 min/day), cinemas/theaters (42.2%; average: 10 min/day), and indoor pools (25.4%; average: 12 min/day). Our results should help in the prioritization of specific projects investigating exposure in children during indoor leisure activities and the evaluation of the risks associated with air pollutants in these places.

Key Words:

• children exposure
• time budget data
• indoor leisure places
• indoor air quality
• gymnasium
• day-care center

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was supported by the national program research of the French Indoor Air Quality Observatory financed by the French Ministries in charge of Housing and Construction, Health and Solidarity, Ecology and Sustainable Development, the Agency for the Environment and Energy control, the National Housing Agency, and the Scientific and Technical Centre for Building.

Notes

¹INSEE (2002).

²One hundred towns were included in the survey. The 11 largest towns were included automatically. The other were sampled proportionally to their number of household after divided into 15 stratum based on the 5 phone areas and 3 sizes.

³The purpose was to collect data from 3000 households thus requiring about 30 households per town. A simple random sampling in each town (each household had the same probability of being drawn) was carried out. For the 11 largest cities, the number of households drawn was particular to each city (i.e., number of households to be interviewed in metropolitan France × number of households in the towns >100,000 households/number of households in metropolitan France). The sampling was carried out by the yellow page service that managed all the phone numbers corresponding to fixed stations in France.

^aThe distribution of the respondents among the 15 stratum was not different from the one determined in the sampling scheme (p-value = .8).