Why are you allowed to go to school on your own? Exploring children's voices on independent mobility

Abstract

BACKGROUNDChildren's independent mobility, defined as the freedom to move around their neighbourhood without adult supervision (Tranter & Whitelegg, 1994), has multiple physical, mental and social development benefits. Research suggests that, in terms of physical benefits, children who travel

One should really be more worried about too little physical activity than injuries while walking or cycling to school. Parents’ perception of risk concerning active school transportation.

“…Furthermore, our findings indicate that children can grow with the transportation responsibility in relation to independent AST. This result is consistent with the findings of Legorburu et al (2022) showing that children who could go to school alone feel that their parents trust them more. Furthermore, being able to use AST unaccompanied by parents, alone or with friends, can foster children's autonomy and improve both parents' and children's perceptions of safety (Herrador-Colmenero et al, 2017).…”

“…According to the parents participating in our study, promoting active transportation should be prioritized to a higher level, and schools could have an important role in that process. This finding is consistent with Legorburu et al (2022) who concluded that schools should implement projects that aim to promote AST in order to improve children's physical condition and their psychological and personal development. This concept is highly relevant for policy-makers and practitioners within municipalities in many countries.…”

“…One such example could be that adults accept and perceive the level of risk for themselves differently than they would for their children. According to Legorburu et al (2022), families are the main source of construction of security or risk, and family conversations have a great influence on the perceptions that children have of their environment. Moreover, the authors conclude that it is essential for families to provide confidence so that children feel able and confident to use AST.…”

Children’s active school transportation: an international scoping review of psychosocial factors

“…The findings also differed by sex in several studies, e.g. regarding social support from parents, which proved worthy of additional consideration as previous research has reported a higher perceived vulnerability concerning stranger danger for girls than boys [ 49 ].…”

The challenge of education for sustainability in higher education: key themes and competences within the University of the Basque Country

“…Closed-ended questions were analyzed using SPSS v.26 software for data analysis, performing descriptive analyses, whereas the responses to the open questions were analyzed using Iramuteq software for lexical analysis ( Ratinaud, 2009 ; Ratinaud and Marchand, 2012 ) and specifically the Reinert method for corpus analysis ( Reinert, 1983 , 1990 ). This method has frequently been used for the study of open questions ( Souza et al, 2018 ; Larruzea-Urkixo et al, 2021 ; Idoiaga Mondragon et al, 2022 ; Legorburu et al, 2022 ), and it has been chosen because it eliminates the usual reliability and validity problems in text analysis ( Klein and Licata, 2003 ). Using this method, which follows a descending hierarchical cluster analysis format, a series of classes and statistical cues in the form of typical words and text segments are obtained ( Idoiaga and Belasko, 2019 ).…”