주거지 근린환경과 개인의 보행활동의 연관성 재검증: 서울시 149개 행정동을 대상으로

Abstract

This paper is aimed at empirically re-testing the relationship between residential walking activity and neighborhood environment in the city of Seoul. A few previous studies have focused on the relationship of physical environment with either walking activity or health in Korea. However, they have a limitation due to small sample size at the administrative district level (‘dong’ in Korean). Therefore, it is necessary to expand the number of the districts so that it can be reliable in representing their population. For this purpose, three-level (individual, household, and neighborhood) regression modeling were employed using the five-year data (2007-2011) from Korean National Health-nutrition Examination Survey with the total number of 149 administrative districts. Analysis results demonstrates that only one of total 9 physical environment measures has significant association with personal walking activity at the personal level, unlike the results of the other papers. However, based on our results, it would be too early to deduce the conclusion that most residential physical environment at the spatial level is not significantly related to personal walking activity. In order to generalize our result, we need more empirical studies with more sophisticated approach. The study suggests that further researches need to focus on identifying the relationship by walking purpose as well as expanding the study area from the city of Seoul to other non-Seoul cities.