ABSTRACT
The World Health Organisation purports childhood obesity to be one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. Inextricably linked with the ever-growing discourse on childhood obesity in both the popular press and scientific literature is the issue of physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB; sitting). To respond to this global health challenge, data on these aforementioned phenomena are required to ascertain population trends, relations with markers of health status and the success of prevention/treatment interventions. However, little research has examined the role of difference or othering in these data activities. Therefore, the first part of this chapter will present the notion of ‘unintentional othering’ as part of an inadvertent consequence of a national weight surveillance programme for children. The second part of this chapter focuses on the role of objective measurement methods to examine physical inactivity inequality within large datasets. Taken together these sections provide examples of how traditional public health research methods both create difference and therefore ‘other’ research participants, but can alternatively be employed to study difference.
