Is ‘Citizen Kid’ an Independent Kid? The Relationship between Children's Independent Mobility and Active Citizenship

Abstract

Children want to engage with their city and have freedom to explore and learn. CATCH (Children, Active Travel, Connectedness and Health) is a three-year research project investigating local environment influences on children's independent mobility, social connectedness and health in four Australian cities. In this project, ‘active citizenship’ as well as children's ability to articulate local environmental preferences through photo collages correlated with higher levels of independent mobility. Taking a social constructivist perspective, these results are analyzed to explain how children's active citizenship might be grounded in experiences of local neighbourhood and what this might mean for children and cities.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank their CATCH/iMATCH colleagues for comments made, contributions given and collaboration over the past three years. Special thanks to all the CATCH children whose work is cited in this paper. Without their generous participation, this paper and the research would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. As Lister notes, “the effective age of criminal responsibility is only 10 in England and Wales and eight in Scotland.” Lister's research was conducted in the UK. In Australia, the effective age of criminality is 10 years (source: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/cfi/101-120/cfi106.html).

^2. Semiological analysis requires the researcher to analyse not only just the content but also the ‘signs’ and the meanings of the materials generated (Rose 2007; van Leeuwen 2001).

^3. In Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.

^4. A ‘set’ being three collages: a ‘loved’, a ‘hated’ and a ‘perfect’ collage.

^5. There was a limit to the number of cameras provided to each site, and so some sites (the Queensland sites in particular) had seemingly low response rates by virtue of ‘rationing’ cameras to randomly selected students.

^6. As seen in Table 4 and as corroborated in the CATCH travel diary data analysed by Burke et al. (2013).

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Australian Research Council for funding this work [grant number DP 1094495].