Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

One in every four Canadian adolescent is classified as overweight or obese partially due to physical inactivity. For youth, as time spent on physical activity in school declines, active school transport (AST: e.g., walking, cycling) may be an important and consistent source of physical activity. Given that physical activity declines through adolescence, and that lifelong physical activity patterns are established in childhood, encouraging any amount of active commuting at a young age could be beneficial in the long-term. Recently, public health has begun to explore how the neighbourhood environment helps or hinders individuals' physical activity and this research should now be extended to understanding AST. Identifying the specific characteristics of schools and their surrounding neighbourhood that influence how adolescents get to school may help inform interventions and policies aimed at modifying environments to promote AST. To accurately identify these characteristics it is important to use objective measures of the environment (e.g., number of intersections; presence of sidewalks; transport infrastructure). There has been very little research of this sort in Canada. My study will use a provincially representative dataset, the Ontario Student Drug Use Survey, to examine the percentage of adolescents who walk or cycle to and/or from schools in Ontario, identify who these children are (e.g., are boys more likely to walk to school than girls?), identify how the built environment influence decision on school transport mode across Ontario, using objective measure of the environment. This project will broaden our understanding of how many youth walk or cycle to school provincially while also providing insight into the factors that increase the chances that youth use AST. Such information is critical for developing policy and interventions aimed at increasing AST and my analyses will provide a platform for monitoring such interventions in the future.