Developing and testing a street audit tool using Google Street View to measure environmental supportiveness for physical activity

International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity

Paul Wilkinson³  Andy Jones⁴  Emma Coombes⁴  Charlie Foster²  Melvyn Hillsdon¹  Pippa Griew¹ 

[1] Sport and Health Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK;Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK;Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

关键词: Street audit;    Environment;    Walking;    Physical activity;   

Others  :  806504
DOI  :  10.1186/1479-5868-10-103

 received in 2012-12-18, accepted in 2013-08-16,  发布年份 2013

【 摘 要 】

Background

Walking for physical activity is associated with substantial health benefits for adults. Increasingly research has focused on associations between walking behaviours and neighbourhood environments including street characteristics such as pavement availability and aesthetics. Nevertheless, objective assessment of street-level data is challenging. This research investigates the reliability of a new street characteristic audit tool designed for use with Google Street View, and assesses levels of agreement between computer-based and on-site auditing.

Methods

The Forty Area STudy street VIEW (FASTVIEW) tool, a Google Street View based audit tool, was developed incorporating nine categories of street characteristics. Using the tool, desk-based audits were conducted by trained researchers across one large UK town during 2011. Both inter and intra-rater reliability were assessed. On-site street audits were also completed to test the criterion validity of the method. All reliability scores were assessed by percentage agreement and the kappa statistic.

Results

Within-rater agreement was high for each category of street characteristic (range: 66.7%-90.0%) and good to high between raters (range: 51.3%-89.1%). A high level of agreement was found between the Google Street View audits and those conducted in-person across the nine categories examined (range: 75.0%-96.7%).

Conclusion

The audit tool was found to provide a reliable and valid measure of street characteristics. The use of Google Street View to capture street characteristic data is recommended as an efficient method that could substantially increase potential for large-scale objective data collection.

【 授权许可】

   
2013 Griew et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

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