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The problem
Intervention: Outdoor play in early childhood (ages 2-4 years)
Who it was tested with: 4,151 children from the Growing up in Scotland nationally representative cohort.
Children or communities are compared with a group that did not receive the intervention, or followed over years. This is the design that best separates what the intervention did from everything else that changed.
"We used growth mixture modelling (GMM) to identify trajectories over time for internalising and externalising symptoms separately. Next, we used multilevel multinomial regression to evaluate whether early outdoor play predicted trajectory classification." The study tracks children longitudinally with repeated measurements of mental health symptoms across four timepoints and uses statistical methods to determine whether early outdoor play predicts which mental health trajectory group children follow, allowing for examination of dose-response relationships.
Reliance on parent-report for both outdoor play behaviour and mental health symptom assessment; longitudinal observational design cannot establish causation; potentially unmeasured confounding factors; sample specific to Scotland
Across countries and designs
1 study · 1 country
