Use of a Systematic Observational Measure to Assess and Compare Walkability for Older Adults in Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon Neighbourhoods

Abstract

This study assessed neighbourhood walkability for older adults in eight neighbourhoods of Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland Oregon, utilizing the newly developed environmental audit tool ‘SWEAT-R’. The discrete variable based data are complemented with qualitative observation data. Findings indicate that the audit tool has a 95% or higher inter-rater reliability for more than 80% of the items. Neighbourhood environmental data suggest that neighbourhoods in Vancouver region have more urban design features supportive of walking behaviour. Sidewalk and street life environmental features were relatively similar across all four Portland neighbourhoods, however, there were notable differences in sidewalk characteristics among the four Vancouver neighbourhoods. The audit tool is useful in documenting walkable features in urban and suburban neighbourhoods with particular relevance to older adults’ needs.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The authors wish to thank Dr Michael Hayes for access to the GIS data used in the neighbourhood selection process for Metro Vancouver. They also express appreciation to Tracy Dodge, Rob Oswald, Chris Au-Yeung, Mary Sepulveda and Adrienne Wedding for their contributions to data collection.

Notes

1. For Portland neighbourhood selections, the initial pool of neighbourhoods to choose from were limited to 12 neighbourhoods already selected for participation in an ongoing study of community dwelling older adults (Michael et al., 2009). This pool included neighbourhoods that were geographically distributed throughout the metropolitan region, and represented traditional as well as suburban areas. All census tracts in the Metro Vancouver region were included in the initial pool from which final selections were drawn.

2. Adjacent census tracts for the two higher density neighbourhood selections in the Metro Vancouver area were also audited because of the limited number of street segments in the census tract that met the initial selection criteria. Adjacent census tracts had similar characteristics to the initial census tract selection.

3. During data cleaning, items were recorded according to the appropriate skip pattern; in other words, if the observer indicated that a crossing area was not present, then all subsequent crossing area items were automatically set to ‘not applicable’.