| Primary research, policy recommendations, and audit instruments are three responses to the U.S. obesity epidemic offered by built environment-physical activity researchers. This study is concerned with the theoretical foundations of audits.;Primary research and audits play different roles: The former is investigative, the latter is evaluative. Those roles are too often conflated, I argue, altering the type and scope of information available to policymakers, and obscuring an audit's fundamental relationship to distributive justice. This study proposes eight defining characteristics of built environment audits to illustrate the distinctions between audits and primary research. Because audits are always normative, and always distributive, they necessarily contain definitions of distributive justice. Primary research, on the other hand, is not necessarily bound by normativity or the definition of distributive justice.;Three types of audit information are identified---"satisfactions," "opportunities," and "capability"---each corresponding to one of the three moral-philosophical definitions by J.S. Mill, John Rawls, and Amartya Sen. A "general model for built environment audits" is proposed here, based on the three types of audits proceeding from each of the three definitions. The general audit model is subsequently used to examine the "ecological models" currently guiding built environment-physical activity research.;I argue that ecological models are particularly suited to observing what Sen calls capability, especially when they employ the units of observation called "behavior settings." However, the value of the behavior setting unit is compromised the narrow definition it is often given. I propose an alternative unit of observation, J.J. Gibson's affordance, and undertake to demonstrate how affordance equates with built environment capability.;In the final section, I use a case study protocol based on the general audit model to examine six audit instruments. I attempt to determine the degree to which these current audits gather affordance data within my general audit model. I conclude that few of the audits could be called "affordance audits" outright, however, some of their methodologies could be extended to gather affordance data. |
