Social Participation and Independent Mobility in Children: The Effects of Two Implementations of “We Go to School Alone”

Abstract

The aim of this research was to determine the outcomes of the “We go to school alone” program in two Districts of Rome through a longitudinal study involving 392 children (mean age = 8.37 years) and 270 parents. The outcomes of the program in the two Districts were very different. Only one resulted in an increase in children's autonomous mobility on the home–school journey, a reduction in the number of times a child was taken to school by car, and, even more important, in an increase in the general level of children's independent mobility in their neighborhood. The findings are discussed in terms of a process evaluation that enabled us to understand the differing results.

KEYWORDS:

• children
• evaluation
• home–school journey
• independent mobility
• initiatives
• outdoor autonomy
• social participation

Acknowledgments

This study was funded partly by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), COFIN 2003 (prot. 2003111478_002). We thank the pupils, the parents, the teachers, and the principals of the three schools as well as the volunteers who contributed to the initiatives.

Notes

In these questions there were some missing values.

All data were obtained from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, 2005) and refer to an urban area (59,611 residents) that encompasses the Africano and Trieste neighborhoods.

All data were obtained from ISTAT (2005) and refer to an urban area (65215 residents) that encompasses the Garbatella and Ostiense neighborhoods.

We examined whether the children included in the parents' and children's group (all of whom completed surveys at both T1 and T2) and children whose parents completed no, or only one, questionnaire differed in school attended, class attended, age, gender, mother's age and educational level, distance from home to school, and level of autonomy at time 1. More children of the parents' and children's group attended the third class and tended to live nearer to school, while the others more commonly attended the fourth class and lived a little further away from school. The level of children's autonomy on the home–school journey and their independent mobility (as indicated by the children at Time 1) was similar in the two groups.

We also examined whether the parents who responded to the questionnaire both at time 1 and time 2 differed from the parents who responded only at time 1 with regard to the sociodemographic variables (children's school and class attended, children's age and gender, mother's age and educational level and the distance from home to school) and the level of autonomy of their children at time 1. The parents who responded to the questionnaire at both times, with respect to those who only responded at time 1, had a higher level of education (χ2 = 11.10, d.f. = 4, p = .025), lived closer to the school (χ2 = 6.93, d.f. = 4, p = .031), and their children were more often in third grade (χ2 = 8.86, d.f. = 3, p = .031). Instead, the level of their children's autonomy on the home–school journey and the level of their children's independent mobility (as indicated by the parents at time 1), was similar between the two groups of parents.

Note that the mother's level of education and the home–school distance could be gathered only from questionnaires completed by the parents. For this reason all of the ANOVAs were calculated using the data of the participants in the parents' and children's group.

This statement is based not only on examination of Figure 1 and the values of the estimated marginal means, but also on further analyses. In fact, in other repeated measures ANOVAs comparing the three schools two at a time confirmed that in school S1 (compared to the control school C) the initiative was not effective.

This statement is also based on the results of further analysis of the variance for repeated measures calculated by comparing the three schools two at a time.