Physical activity has significant health benefits, ranging from increased cardiovascular function to improved mental health and wellness. Estimating physical health is important in gauging the potential for physical health investment in a community.
Improved physical activity rates act as a preventive health measure, reducing negative outcomes such as type 2 diabetes, stroke, and obesity, and improving the overall physical health of a community.
Louisville currently ranks 12th among its peer cities in the percent of adults 20 and older who report no physical activity in their leisure time (28%).
Louisville is in the bottom tier of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers. Cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red lag behind their peers on this indicator.
Louisville’s physical inactivity rate had been decreasing since 2010 but now appears to be on the rise again. It sits well above its peer rate of 24% and has recently landed in the bottom quartile among its peers. On average, the inactivity rate among Louisville’s peers has stayed relatively constant over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Louisville has largely moved in tandem with the worst performer of the group, Indianapolis, which has seen its physical inactivity rate increase by nearly 3 percentage points since 2004. (Louisville’s rate has increased by 2 percentage points over the same period.) Nashville has performed the best since 2004, with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in its physical inactivity rate.
The physical inactivity rate among men and women increased year over year in the early 2000s until it started decreasing from 2010 onward. It now appears to be on an upward swing again. Since 2004, the physical inactivity rate among women has remained about 5 percentage points above that of men. The gap between men and women is narrower among Louisville’s peer cities.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
