Physical activity
Ethnic differences
There was some variation by ethnicity in the proportion of young people who met physical activity guidelines in 2006/07.
Rate ratios provide a useful comparison between the physical activity levels of a single ethnic group and those of the total population. They show that in 2006/07, Asian young people were less likely than the population as a whole to meet physical activity guidelines. European/Other young people were more likely than the total population to meet these guidelines.
No ethnic group showed a statistically significant difference between 2002/03 and 2006/07 in terms of the proportion of its young people who met physical activity guidelines.
Proportion of young people aged 15 to 24 meeting physical activity guidelines, age-standardised rate ratio by ethnicity, 2006/07
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand Health Survey 2006/07. This total-response ethnicity data is age-standardised to allow comparisons between years, and rates thus differ slightly from crude rates. The horizontal gridline at 1.00 represents the total population against which comparative rate ratios are calculated. Where lines extending from datapoints do not cross the 1.00 gridline, this indicates a significant difference between the scores of the ethnic population and those of the total population.
Note
We encourage you to be cautious about drawing conclusions from comparisons between ethnic groups. Apparent differences (in unadjusted data) between ethnic groups can often be explained by factors other than ethnicity per se, such as the different age, sex, geographical and socioeconomic distributions of different ethnic populations. In addition, datasets vary in the way that they collect and record ethnicity data.
