*Corresponding author: Antti Teittinen, Department of Research and Develop- ment, Finnish Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Viljatie 4 A, 00700 Helsinki, Finland, Tel: +358 934809218; E-mail: antti.teittinen@kvl.fi Citation: Teittinen A, Vesala HT (2019) Comparison of Physical Activity be- tween Children and Adolescents with and without Disabilities in Finland. Sport Med Inj Care 1: 003. Received: August 29, 2019; Accepted: September 16, 2019; Published: Sep- tember 23, 2019 Copyright: © 2019 Teittinen A and Vesala HT. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction The biennial data collection of the Leisure Survey for Children and Adolescents in Finland was extended in 2018 to include children and adolescents with disabilities. This was done by picking up people with disabilities aged 7-17 from the Finland’s Social Insurance Insti- tution’s registry and disseminating a social media link to a question- naire targeting children and adolescents with special needs aged 7-17. The responses obtained through these two data collection methods represent a group of children and adolescents with disabilities in the study. Obtaining such a sample can be diffcult because perceptions and defnitions of what is a disability or disability are heterogeneous, and different defnitions emphasize slightly different issues [1-4]. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which en- tered into force in Finland in 2016, defnes disability as a medically understandable condition that can cause functional disability, but at the same time it is a phenomenon that is constantly being redefned in interactions and contexts, societies and cultures. In this way, the UN Convention on Disability emphasizes the relationship between disability and its environment. In the leisure study of children and adolescents, the defnition of disability was based on the disability registry data of the Social Insurance Institution. We are motivated to do comparative research between people with and without disabilities because people with disabilities are most often excluded from nationwide population surveys. Even if people with disabilities are included in the sample, they cannot be identifed and the results are not reported from this perspective. Studies on peo- ple with disabilities are usually conducted within a disability group, and the results are often not comparable to studies on the general pop- ulation. And this is also evident in the Leisure Survey for Children and Adolescents in Finland: children and adolescents with disabilities are only included in a separate sample and were not included in the original study. Our starting point in the article is the emphasis of the UN Con- vention on Disability on the relationship between the phenomenon of disability and its environment. We look at and compare the physical activities of children and adolescents with disabilities results from a basic sample of the Leisure Survey for the same age group. The samples selected for the examinations generally exclude persons with different types of disabilities, such as those in institutions or service housing [5-7]. The living conditions of people with disabilities have generally been studied solely by different disability groups, and their own indicators have been developed for these studies. Then compar- isons with the rest of the population have been impossible. In this study, at least a partial comparison between disabled and other chil- dren and adolescents is possible because the questionnaire for adoles- cents with disabilities contained partly the same questions as the basic sample questionnaire for children and adolescents. Studies of physical activity among children and adolescents with disabilities and functional limitations in their own groups have often focused on the connection between physical activity and quality of life [8,9], access to physical activity [10], adverse health effects of Teittinen A and Vesala HT, Sport Med Inj Care 2019, 1: 003 HSOA Sports Medicine and Injury Care Journal Research Article Antti Teittinen* and Hannu T Vesala Department of Research and Development, Finnish Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Espoo, Finland Comparison of Physical Activity between Children and Adolescents with and without Disabilities in Finland Abstract Aim: To compare physical activity between children and adolescents with and without disabilities in Finland. Materials and Methods: We use two materials: a separate sample of children and adolescents with disabilities and a basic sample of the Finnish Leisure Study for Children and Adolescents from 2018. A separate sample (n = 152) was collected by sending a question- naire to 500 adolescents with disabilities. We limited the data to 13-17-year-olds (n = 303). We combined a basic sample of the study material (n = 241) with a separate sample (n = 62) of adolescents with disabilities. Method is a quantitative survey analysis. Results: The main fnding of our study is that adolescents with dis- abilities engage in less physical activity than adolescents without disabilities in the 13-17 age groups. The physical activity of adoles- cents with disabilities compared to the corresponding physical ac- tivity parameters of adolescents without disabilities explains, on the one hand, the differences in physical activity between these groups as social situations and on the other hand the motivational factors of physical activity. Conclusions: In the context of the UN CRPD defnition of disability, the study reinforced the notion of the changing meaning of disability in different contexts. In some cases, the disability played a role in relation to social situations in exercise and in some cases did not. Examining the physical activity of people with disabilities reveals the conditions for participating in physical activity: which promote and which restrict or reduce participation in physical activity. Keywords: Children and adolescents; Disability; Physical activity