%0 Journal Article
%T Development, scoring, and reliability for the Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes for Safe Routes to School (MAPS-SRTS) instrument.
%A Ganzar LA
%A Burford K
%A Salvo D
%A Spoon C
%A Sallis JF
%A Hoelscher DM
%J BMC Public Health
%V 24
%N 1
%D 2024 Mar 6
%M 38448838
%F 4.135
%R 10.1186/s12889-024-18202-9
%X BACKGROUND: Active commuting to school can be a meaningful contributor to overall physical activity in children. To inform better micro-level urban design near schools that can support active commuting to school, there is a need for measures that capture these elements. This paper describes the adaptation of an observational instrument for use in assessing micro-scale environments around urban elementary schools in the United States.
METHODS: The Micro-scale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes for Safe Routes to School (MAPS-SRTS) was developed from existing audit instruments not designed for school travel environments and modifications for the MAPS-SRTS instrument include the structure of the audit tool sections, the content, the observation route, and addition of new subscales. Subscales were analyzed for inter-rater reliability in a sample of 36 schools in Austin, TX. To assess reliability for each subscale, one-way random effects single-measure intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were used.
RESULTS: Compared to the 30 original subscales, the adapted MAPS-SRTS included 26 (86.6%) subscales with revised scoring algorithms. Most MAPS-SRTS subscales had acceptable inter-rater reliability, with an ICC of 0.97 for the revised audit tool.
CONCLUSIONS: The MAPS-SRTS audit tool is a reliable instrument for measuring the school travel environment for research and evaluation purposes, such as assessing human-scale determinants of active commuting to school behavior and documenting built environment changes from infrastructure interventions.