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

Abstract

Current active research on school travel emphasizes travel distance and neighborhood walkability as major environmental conditions affecting the occurrences of children walking or biking to school. The impacts of parental travel attitudes on children's school travel behavior remain understudied. This paper outlines a conceptual framework that incorporates the relationships of attitudes, environment conditions, and children's walking or biking to school. The framework recognizes the predictive power that attitudinal factors have for children's walking or biking to school; the framework also highlights the moderating effects of parental travel attitudes on the predictive power of some environment conditions. By using data (1,197 cases) from a school travel survey conducted in a midsized school district in Oregon, this paper reports that parental attitudes toward walking or biking to school and car use are significant explanatory variables in models predicting occurrence of children walking or biking to school when the models control for important environmental variables. The analysis also reveals that important built environment variables—travel distance to school and neighborhood walkability—exhibit varying levels of impacts on the probability of children walking or biking to school when parents demonstrate different attitudes toward active school commuting and car use. The paper discusses implications of the research findings for the challenges facing Safe Routes to School Programs and explores approaches that can make these programs more effective.