Barriers to and facilitators of active travel from the youth perspective: A qualitative meta-synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Active travel (AT) such as walking, cycling, or wheeling to/from places represents a relatively accessible form of transportation and source of physical activity for younger populations (ages 5–19). While youth AT is a topic of interest to geography, planning, and public health audiences, larger-scale qualitative reviews of specific topics like in-depth investigations of youth perceived barriers and facilitators of AT have been generally lacking. To offer an original qualitative review of this literature in service of supporting more precise intervention programming and policy recommendations, as well as to outline directions for future research, this paper pairs systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis methods to document and thematically synthesize the existing qualitative literature regarding youth perceptions of AT barriers and facilitators. After vetting the results of our search, 53 papers met the parameters of the review inclusion criteria and were included in the final meta-synthesis. Using the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s tool, quality assessments of the 53 included articles suggested, generally, low- to moderate-quality research. Applying qualitative meta-analytical methods, the ensuing developed themes outlined youth perceived barriers as emphasizing social and physical threats, poor motivation and efficacy, and unsupportive local social and community capital. Perceived facilitator themes were characterized by positive individual assessments of AT skill and efficacy, social dynamics, and supportive local community environments. Collectively the generated themes related to perceived barriers and facilitators indicated that factors from across multiple levels (e.g., individual, community) of both social and built environments can be consequential in youth AT decision-making processes and eventual participation, suggesting that future AT interventions should consider multi-level approaches and designs in their programming efforts. Future research is encouraged to undertake sociogeographically comparative or targeted group analyses, explore the inclusion of youth perspectives of, or contributions to, local AT policy, and investigate crucial perceptual mechanisms more in-depth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".