Identifying Parent Perspectives to Guide Active Travel Intervention with Small Populations

Abstract

This paper investigates a strategy for guiding school-based active travel intervention. School-based active travel programs address the travel behaviors and perceptions of small target populations (i.e., at individual schools) so they can encourage people to walk or bike. Thus, planners need to know as much as possible about the behaviors and perceptions of their target populations. However, existing strategies for modeling travel behavior and segmenting audiences typically work with larger populations and may not capture the attitudinal diversity of smaller groups. This case study used Q technique to identify salient travel-related attitude types among parents at an elementary school in Denver, Colorado; 161 parents presented their perspectives about school travel by rank-ordering 36 statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree in a normalized distribution, single centered around no opinion. Thirty-nine respondents’ cases were selected for case-wise cluster analysis in SPSS according to criteria that made them most likely to walk: proximity to school, grade, and bus service. Analysis revealed five core perspectives that were then correlated with the larger respondent pool: optimistic walkers, fair-weather walkers, drivers of necessity, determined drivers, and fence sitters. Core perspectives are presented–characterized by parents’ opinions, personal characteristics, and reported travel behaviors–and recommendations are made for possible intervention approaches. The study concludes that Q technique provides a fine-grained assessment of travel behavior for small populations, which would benefit small-scale behavioral interventions.

Intraurban Rail Access

“…One of the key research objectives was to evaluate the Q-technique as a tool for understanding passengers' attitudes toward access to rail stations. Zuniga provides a detailed description of the Q-technique data collection and analysis methods that were used in this study (16). The methods are also briefly described in this paper.…”

“…Each respondent represented his or her complete perspective by organizing the statements in a normalized distribution single-centered on a mean score of zero. By imposing that distribution, the exercise compelled respondents to consider the statements in relation to each other, rather than rating them independently, and made it possible to evaluate each person's perspective as a whole (3,16,18,19). That rank ordering provides a critical dimension to the data set that makes it possible to identify clusters of similar attitudes.…”

“…The purpose of the Q-sorting exercise was to identify a range of viewpoints present in the population rather than to generalize those views to a larger population or to weigh them against each other in occurrence (16,20). Thus, one of the benefits of the Q-technique is that it does not require a large, representative sample of respondents (16,19). Instead, it is advantageous to select a group of respondents who might be expected to differ significantly in their perspectives.…”

“…Statements included in the Q-set are typically drawn from sources that reflect the language and ideas of study participants and should capture an issue of central concern to policy makers (16,17,20). The source can include a combination of published media (academic, industry, popular) or it can be developed through qualitative data collection (interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, etc.).…”

Integrating Parental Attitudes in Research on Children's Active School Commuting

“…Although the relations of some of these constructs with travel behavior have been considered within the broader literature on travel behavior (18), research on school travel has not paid sufficient attention to psychological variables. The number of school travel studies that have included psychological variables in their analyses is limited (19,(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42), and even fewer have sufficiently operationalized measures of these variables. Moreover, possible interactions between psychological and environmental factors have been mostly ignored.…”