It’s about being the good parent: exploring attitudes and beliefs towards active school transportation

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a decline in active school transportation (AST). Parents play an important role as the key decision-makers of children's AST, and there is a need of more knowledge about the decision-making process and parents' beliefs towards AST. The overall aim of this study was to explore parents' attitudes and beliefs towards AST in the northern part of Sweden. Twenty parents participated in semi-structured interviews, which was based on the theory of planned behaviour. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the interviews. The analysis yielded one main theme, "Parenting and active school transportation-making route choices in a changed landscape" and four subthemes, "Knowing that it is beneficial while struggling with daily life", "Considering barriers and solutions to enable AST", "Parenting is challenging and about balancing", and "Reflecting and contemplating about what we and others do". Winter conditions affect parents' decisions, and this needs to be considered when facilitating AST in these regions. Overall better health, increased physical activity, time spent outdoors, and free play were revealed as positive outcomes of AST. Decisions were also influenced by social norms and how the idea of parenting has changed through generations. The findings of this study are likely to be important when promoting AST.

Development and Initial Validation of the PILCAST Questionnaire: Understanding Parents’ Intentions to Let Their Child Cycle or Walk to School

“…In their review, Rivis and Sheeran suggested that descriptive norms are more likely to be important when it comes to behaviors that involve risk [ 27 ]. In addition, our previous results from a qualitative study showed that being perceived as a “good parent” in the eyes of significant others was important to parents [ 33 ]. Parents explained that being a “good parent” could potentially be in conflict with AST, because it would include not exposing their children to risks, which consequently would lead to significant others considering them as irresponsible parents.…”

“…Parents explained that being a “good parent” could potentially be in conflict with AST, because it would include not exposing their children to risks, which consequently would lead to significant others considering them as irresponsible parents. On the other hand, the qualitative study also showed that if parents perceived that significant others allowed their child to use AST, they became more inclined to do the same [ 33 ]. Our results support those of Pang et al [ 23 ], who concluded that it might be efficient to put effort into changing social norms to alter these kinds of intentions in parents.…”

“…These results emphasize the importance of creating supportive environments for health-promoting PA behaviors such as AST [ 46 ]. Here, interventions might also play an important role, supporting both parental strategies (i.e., trusting the child and learning to navigate in traffic) [ 33 ] as well as developing children’s skills [ 47 , 48 ].…”

“…The questionnaire was based on an extended version of the TPB [ 27 , 32 ] and developed in four phases. In the first phase of the development, parents’ salient behavioral beliefs were obtained with the aid of a qualitative study using individual semi-structured interviews [ 33 ].…”

“…In the second phase (a), in line with the guidelines of Ajzen [ 32 ], the most common and frequent assertions from the qualitative study [ 33 ] were formed into statements by the research team. The research team consisted of experts with extensive knowledge of children’s school travel and parents’ attitudes towards AST (authors 1, 2 and 5), in addition to one researcher with extensive knowledge of developing questionnaires based on the TPB (author 3).…”