US Municipal Recreation and Physical Fitness

How Active Are Your Citizens?

The last few years have seen a notable shift in attitudes towards recreation and active living, with individuals, communities, and governments increasingly acknowledging the many benefits provided by regular participation in these types of activities. For example, regular participation in recreation and physical activity is widely recognized for not only contributing to one's overall quality of life, but also for providing important physical, mental, and social health benefits.

Local municipalities can help encourage citizens make healthy living choices by ensuring they have access to a wide range of high-quality recreation services, programs, and facilities. The best way of doing this is to first understand citizens' recreation behaviors and needs.

To accommodate this need, Ipsos is pleased to offer your local government the opportunity to participate in our Municipal Recreation and Physical Fitness syndicated research study. This shared-cost vehicle is conducted on an annual basis and is designed to explore key issues related to recreation and physical activity, including:

How frequently do citizens participate in physical activity?
How do citizens describe their level of physical fitness?
What types of physical activities are citizens participating in?
What are the reasons for participating/not participating in physical activities?
What would encourage citizens to become more physically active?
How satisfied are citizens with their municipality's recreation facilities, programs, and services?
What are citizens' attitudes towards user fees for recreational programs and services?

In addition to these core questions, Ipsos is also pleased to offer two new optional modules that target other important issues related to recreation: physical activity among children and participation in arts and cultural activities.

The Children's Physical Activity module includes questions around the frequency of children's participation in physical activity, the types of physical activities that children participate in, satisfaction with the recreation programs and services that are available for children, and suggestions for children-oriented recreation services and programs that citizens would like to see more of in their community.

The Arts and Culture module includes questions around the frequency of participation in cultural or creative interests, the types of cultural activities that citizens participated in, the reasons for and barriers to participating in cultural activities, and satisfaction with the opportunities for cultural and creative interests that are available in the community.

How Does Your Community Compare to Others?

In addition to looking at the overall opinions and behaviors of your citizens, we believe that one of the best ways to understand how active your citizens are and how well your local government is meeting the community's recreational needs is to compare your results to those of other municipalities. Ipsos' depth and breadth of experience in local government research has enabled us to develop a series of norms for key questions around physical activity and recreation behaviors and needs.

As part of the final deliverables for participating in this study, Ipsos will compare your results to those of other local governments, thereby providing valuable context, added insight, greater depth of analysis, and benchmarks against which to evaluate your performance.

How Does The Survey Work?

We will conduct a telephone survey of 300 citizens aged 18 years of age and older in each local government that decides to participate in the research. This will provide a good overall assessment of the level of physical activity in your community and provide insight into how to encourage greater participation, as well as measure satisfaction with current municipal recreation services and programs. The margin of error on a survey of this size is ±5.7% (19 times out of 20) and the survey is large enough to allow the results to be analyzed according to key demographic variables.

To keep the costs low, the same core questions (outlined above) will be asked in all local governments. However, local governments can add custom questions or increase the number of interviews for an additional charge. Your individual results will not be shared with other local governments.

All Subscribers Receive...

Detailed tables with crosstabulations of the major demographics such as age, gender, length of residency, and families with children under 18.
PowerPoint slides of your results and an in-person presentation of the findings to an audience of your choice (travel will be billed extra).
Access to Ipsos norms.