Projects: Gaia Segantin

Project Overview

My PhD project is about assessing intersectional social inequalities in daily movement behavior – i.e. physical activity (PA), sedentary behavior (SB) and sleep. Intersectionality offers a critical framework for understanding how overlapping social identities, such as gender, race, ethnicity, income, and educational level, shape privilege and disadvantage in daily movement behavior. These intersecting identities likely influence engagement in movement behavior, yet quantitative applications of intersectionality in PA research remain limited, fragmented, and methodologically underdeveloped. Within my project I aim to apply both qualitative and quantitative analyses, including perspectives of socially marginalized populations on opportunities and barriers to engage in healthier movement behavior, with the aim of including more voices in public health research and provide inputs for policies.

First Study

In my first project, I conducted a systematic scoping literature review aimed at understanding the methods for the quantitative operationalization of the intersectional framework in PA research, the PA outcomes explored in intersectional studies, and how the social identities have been understood and categorized in intersectional studies.
The review showed a wide variety in statistical approaches to address intersectional social inequalities in PA. The most frequently used model was a linear or logistic regression model with an interaction term. However, an adequate interpretation of the interaction term was frequently missing. The review also showed that there is a lack of intersectional PA research in smaller children and older adults, and that although sex was frequently explored it was mostly categorized as male/female with little attention to sexual orientation or gender identity. Moreover, the concept of ethnicity, race, origins and migrant backgrounds were often used interchangeably and employed in a way that allows to “put people into boxes”, again without appreciating the diversity within such boxes. The most common PA outcomes were time spent in different intensity levels, and a lack of more advanced metrics. Furthermore, most of the intersectional studies employed questionnaires, with less studies using accelerometers.

Second Study

The project aims (i) to assess the association of various social identities (migration background, family income level, household composition, parental marital status, and gender) with PA and SB in 10-12 years old children in five European countries, and (ii) if country-level macro-economic features (e.g., gender inequality index, human development index, GDP per capita, % of healthcare expenditure on total GDP) is a moderator in this association. An intersectionality lens will be used to interpret the results from a social justice approach.
The project uses accelerometer data from the ENERGY project including children aged 10-12 years old from five European countries (Belgium, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The innovative part of the project is the use of two different models in a comparative approach: Standard mixed model with interaction terms between social identities, and MAIHDA model with decision trees and a moderation analysis with macro-economic country features as moderators.