Convergent Validity of DABQ Questionnaire

Time-use epidemiology is a rapidly growing research area that aims to understand how individuals allocate their time to various activities throughout the day. Accurate assessment of daily activity behaviors, such as sleep, sedentary behavior (SB), light physical activity (LPA), and moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA), is crucial for studying the associations between activity patterns and health outcomes. To gather this information, researchers often rely on self-report questionnaires and objective measures, such as accelerometers, to provide a comprehensive understanding of individuals' activity levels. Recently, a validated questionnaire known as the Daily Activity Behavior Questionnaire (DABQ) has been developed. In a study comparing DABQ estimates with the activPAL4 accelerometer (as the reference method), good results regarding absolute agreement and consistency were obtained for sleep duration (ICC 0.6), while the absolute agreement and consistency for SB, LPA, and MVPA estimates was lower (ICC ranging from 0.22-0.47). It should be noted that this study acknowledges the limitation of not treating the data as compositional data. Compositional data analysis accounts for the relative distribution of different activities and avoids the assumption of independence between behaviors. Additionally, the activPAL4 accelerometer used as the reference method in the study had its own strengths and weaknesses when compared to other objective measures, such as the Actigraph. Where ActivPAL4 is more used to differentiate between sitting and standing, Actigraph is able to better classify activity intensities. Moreover, as recommended in different research, I use the Actigraph in my PhD to objectively asses 24-hour movement behaviors. Given these considerations, the aim of this study is to validate the DABQ against the Actigraph as the reference method. Furthermore, this study aims to analyze the data as compositional data, which would provide a more comprehensive u