Excessive sitting at work and at home: Correlates of occupational sitting and TV viewing time in working adults

Recent evidence links sedentary behaviour (or too much sitting) with poorer health outcomes; many adults accumulate the majority of their daily sitting time through occupational sitting and TV viewing. To further the development and targeting of evidence-based strategies there is a need for identification of the factors associated with higher levels of these behaviours. This study examined socio-demographic and health-related correlates of occupational sitting and of combined high levels of occupational sitting/TV viewing time amongst working adults.

Participants were attendees of the third wave (2011/12) of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle (AusDiab) study who worked full-time (≥35 h/week; n = 1,235; 38 % women; mean ± SD age 53 ± 7 years). Logistic and multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted (separately for women and men) to assess cross-sectional associations of self-reported occupational sitting time (categorised as high/low based on the median) and also the combination of occupational sitting time/TV viewing time (high/low for each outcome), with a number of potential socio-demographic and health-related correlates.