New article with Elise Desjardins, Jason Lam, @geodarcy, Damian Collins, and Owen Waygood on how #active#school#travel is framed in Ontario, Canada.
Frames provide organizing principles and stories for understanding phenomena, and they can modify the alternatives that the public is willing or able to contemplate to tackle issues.
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Analysis of publicly available documents by school boards, municipalities, and transportation consortia help identify the frames used to discuss active school travel in Ontario.
The way various organizations frame active school travel in a way that is scientist, and in agreement with the scientific consensus about the benefits of active lifestyles.
However, it is also framed as an individual choice, and no sense of urgency is conveyed to the public.
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By framing active school travel as an individual choice collective action is kept out of the frame, which limits the range of policy alternatives that the public is aware of.
If we had to paraphrase how active school travel is framed in Ontario, it would be like this:
"Spinach is good for you; here are some tips for choosing spinach."
While reasonable, the message is not particularly persuasive.
@paezha@geodarcy Would conveying urgency be more effective? How about instead “Spinach is good for you, and can be fun to eat and give you a sense of independence and competence”? (Ok, those last bits don’t really work with spinach…)
Research has found that many children that are driven/bused to school would like to walk or cycle instead; in this case, parents are an important part of the decision-making process, and for them "independence" and "competence" often rank lower than "safe from traffic" or "no risk of abduction by pervs or aliens".
@paezha@geodarcy Got it. It sounds like parents may be more convinced by policy around safety than by moral urgency.
Thanks for highlighting this research — I work for an injury prevention org that in part promotes safe and active school travel, so this is really helpful!
Happy to connect! There is an interesting circularity in behavior-consequences that we note in the paper: traffic is dangerous because many people drive their kids to school to keep them safe from the dangerous traffic.
This is where calls for collective action are important: one single person leaving the car behind does not make active travel to school substantially safer; things are safer only when many do.
Appealing to secular morality and conveying a sense of urgency have been found in the past to be more effective frames to support policy. Perhaps it is time for Ontario to present active school travel as an urgent matter in need of collective action.
The research presented in this paper was developed as an open, reproducible research project:
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