Project 418225

Active school travel (AST), such as walking, cycling, and rollerblading, improves children's health, air quality, and road safety. However, fewer North American children today, than in previous generations, use AST. While interventions promoting AST show improvements, the results also highlight gender inequities. At both baseline and post-intervention, boys are more likely than girls to have higher rates of AST. This research uses qualitative methods to explore children's preferences for AST interventions and identify how they differ among genders. Grade 5 and 6 students from two schools in London, Ontario were invited to participate in this study. In gender-based groups (n=30 groups, 5 students per group), students led researchers on a walk through their school neighbourhood (within 1 km). Throughout the walk, students took pictures and videos using Collector for ArcGIS to document their perceptions of barriers and enablers to AST. Students then used the five E's of road safety (i.e., education, encouragement, engineering, enforcement, and evaluation) as a guide to design an intervention targeting a barrier identified from the walk. Focus groups were then conducted, in which they explained and reflected on their intervention strategies. Focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed in NVivo 12. Themes related to student-developed AST interventions will be discussed with a gender-focused lens. Girls tend to recommend interventions that aim to increase AST-related skills and change infrastructure in their environment. Whereas boys were more likely to suggest strategies addressing the social aspects of AST such as recreational facilities along the route. This research aims to address gender inequity by informing child-led and gender-based AST interventions. As AST interventions are gaining momentum and support, it is important to ensure that the interventions and programs being supported are effective and equitable among genders.