317189
Health in transportation: Impacts of a statewide intervention on students' and families' walking and bicycling activity
Two years ago, North Carolina’s Department of Transportation and Division of Public Health established an innovative project. This project was developed to create opportunities for youth to safely walk and bike to school to reduce prevalent sedentary lifestyles. Since late 2013, ten regional Coordinators have been facilitating schools’ and municipalities' implementation of walking- and bicycling-supportive policies, and use of evidence-based educational and promotional interventions toward realizing this goal.
2) Methods:
Employing a panel study design to monitor 40 schools over 1.5 years, our team is linking interventions with three outcomes: (a) students’ travel mode distributions; (b) parents’ levels of walking- and biking activity; and (c) schools’ “readiness” to promote safe walking and biking. This latter measure—the “Active Travel Readiness Scale”—is adapted from the “Perceived School Climate for Active Travel Scale.” It is a Coordinator-reported assessment of schools’ apparent engagement with active school travel, and shows promise in detecting subtle shifts in schools’ degree of support for walking and biking.
3) Results:
Our team will discuss mid-intervention results. We anticipate that (a) schools with the greatest levels of “readiness” will (b) increase the proportion of students who actively travel to school where adequate infrastructure exists, and that (c) student travel patterns will influence parents’ engagement in walking and bicycling.
4) Discussion:
This is the first known study to employ an “Active Travel Readiness Scale” and to discern relationships between students’ school travel modes and their parents’ walking and biking participation.
Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programsConduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health
Learning Objectives:
Explain how an inter-departmental partnership is working toward enhancing children’s acquisition of physical activity throughout the state
Define what the “active travel readiness scale” is designed to measure
Describe the three main outcomes measured in this evaluation
Keyword(s): Public Health Research, Evaluation
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I designed the panel study which this evaluation employs, as well as the "Active Travel Readiness Scale" referenced in the abstract. I have several years of experience conducting impact evaluations for regional, state, and federal agencies and partners. My research interests include developing and carrying out innovative study designs that address what works, why it works, and under what conditions it works.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.