Characterizing Sedentary Behaviour in Residents With Intellectual Disability in Community Living Arrangements.
Adults with ID in group homes sit nearly eight hours daily—aim movement programs at residents who need the most help with daily tasks and have less schooling.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Laxton et al. (2026) strapped activity monitors on adults with intellectual disability who live in group homes. They wanted to know how long these adults sit or lie still while awake.
The team also checked two things: how well each adult can do daily tasks like dressing or brushing teeth, and how much schooling they had.
What they found
Adults sat almost eight hours each day. That is like watching four movies back-to-back.
People who needed more help with daily living sat for longer stretches. People who finished fewer years of school also sat longer.
How this fits with other research
Tassé et al. (2013) and Mikulovic et al. (2014) show the same group sits less when they wake up early. Paige adds the detail that poor daily-living skills, not just sleep time, drive the long sitting bouts.
Zuriff (2005) already warned that adults with ID in care homes are inactive. Paige now gives the hard numbers with wearable trackers, updating the older survey data.
Lin et al. (2013) found that less schooling links to lower independence in daily tasks. Paige links those same two traits to longer sedentary time, joining the ideas into one risk profile.
Why it matters
If you run day programs or homes for adults with ID, start by screening who needs the most help with dressing, toileting, or cooking. Those same adults are the ones glued to chairs for hours. Build movement breaks into their personal-care routines: stand while brushing teeth, walk to fetch clothes, or dance during TV ads. Small, built-in steps can chip away at those eight sedentary hours without needing extra staff time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Adults with intellectual disabilities (IDs), particularly those who reside in community living arrangements (CLAs), are at high risk for these chronic diseases. Sedentary behaviour (SB) is an emergent, independent risk factor for several chronic diseases including cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. SB may represent a potent behavioural target to mitigate chronic disease risk in adults with ID who live in CLAs. Limiting the development of interventions to address SB is a lack of understanding of device-estimated SB patterns. Also not clear are the individual-level determinants of SB in this high-risk group of CLA residents with ID. The current study sought to address these knowledge gaps. METHODS: A cross-sectional observational study design was used to characterize SB patterns and individual-level determinants of SB in adults with ID living in CLAs. Thirty-eight adults from 24 different CLAs wore activPAL devices for 1 week to enable device estimates of SB. activPAL data were processed, and the study outcomes of daily time spent in SB, SB bout lengths, sedentary breaks and prolonged SB were generated. Participants also completed an online survey to assess individual factors, which included demographics, independence, programming and health status. Univariate statistics were used to describe SB patterns and logistic regression models were used to ascertain the association between individual factors and SB variables. RESULTS: On average, the sample were aged 44.79 years (SD = 14.9), and 60.53% were male. The sample were highly sedentary: 47.37% engaged in prolonged SB, the daily average time in SB was 7.46 h (SD = 2.18), and an average of 32.4 daily SB bouts (95% CI = 28.9, 35.9) lasted 17.7 min (95% CI = 13.8, 21.7). Participants requiring more assistance with ADLs were more likely to have longer uninterrupted sedentary bouts (95% CI = 0.169, 1.721; β = 0.945; p = 0.018) and total daily duration of SB (95% CI = 4.58, 20.21; β = 12.394; p = 0.003). Those with less than a high school education had sedentary bouts that were ~15 min longer (95% CI = 3.21, 25.69; p = 0.013). CONCLUSIONS: Adults with ID living in CLAs spent almost 8 h of their waking day in SB. Those with lower levels of independence and education were more likely to have higher levels of SB. CLAs may represent a critical opportunity for targeted, place-based interventions to reduce time spent in SB.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2026 · doi:10.1111/jir.70095