Incorporating children's views and perceptions about urban mobility

Abstract

There is an increasing concern among scholars and practitioners to incorporate children's views and perceptions about their daily mobility, followed by the search for structured approaches for data collection and analysis. This paper draws on academic research conducted with 5 to 6-year old children and their caregivers (N = 317) in three public preschools in São Paulo (Brazil) with a high prevalence of low-income immigrants, using the "Philosophy with Children” (PwC) inquiry approach. Once the PwC sessions were transcribed and associated to the questionnaires to caregivers (73% response rate), it was possible to adopt a set of qualitative analysis tools to extract children's views and perceptions about urban mobility, namely topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and sentiment analysis (AFINN and Bing sentiment lexicons). These allowed the identification of variables affecting the opinions about urban mobility shared by young children, including more negative perceptions among boys, non-native children, and those in high social vulnerability. Beyond revealing a potential of the PwC approach to enquire children about their established travel behavior, the implementation of the proposed inquiry sessions covered an age group that is commonly disregarded in most of transport-related studies involving children and youth while encompassing a context of public schools in a developing country, with a high prevalence of low-income and immigrant families.

Assessing the impact of discussing and practicing urban mobility on the travel behavior of young children and their caregivers: mixed-method empirical research in public preschools in São Paulo (Brazil)

“…For further description about the context of children and selected schools cf. Humberto et al (2020a).…”

“…However, both inquiry sessions and outdoor walking activities here analyzed over a five-month period seem to have contributed to alter the observed travel behavior of caregivers and certain perceptions of children and their caregivers (polarity of statements during the PwC sessions and social norms, respectively). Moreover, the methods adopted have provided an opportunity to deepen qualitative research designs by capturing the perceptions of preschool-age children (up to 6 years old) using their own words (Humberto et al, 2020a), bridging the gap of previous research on the influences on travel behavior intention, which has "often depended heavily on obtaining information through research questionnaires and interviews using the words of the researcher". (Line et al, 2010).…”

“…Data provided by children (aged 5-6 y/o.) consist of the sentiment orientation (positive to negative) of the children's statements during the inquiry sessions as obtained using sentiment analysis (Humberto et al, 2020a).…”

“…Recent applications of the PwC involving urban mobility include the discussion of "themes related to mobility and permanence in the public space, such as going from home to school, playing in the garden and going out to open spaces" (Barreiros et al, 2019). In this study, a series of eleven PwC sessions was carried out to address different dimensions of urban mobility from the children's point of view, whose detailed description is provided by Humberto et al (2020a). The inquiry sessions were applied weekly to the entire sample (N = 299 children from nine classes).…”

“…This includes polarity values for children's statements between -3.000 and 4.000 once terms are reassembled in the corresponding segments and divided by the segment of text's word count (mean: -0.080, median: -0.125). Likewise, a detailed description of the sentiment analysis used in this manuscript is provided by Humberto et al (2020a).…”