Measuring children's active travel - reliability and validity of participatory mapping method against accelerometry

Examining children's active travel and related associations with health and sustainability outcomes requires valid, accurate and reliable measures. Prevalent methods such as self-report physical activity questionnaires and accelerometers are validated tools for assessing physical activity and active travel, but alone ill-fitting for assessing environmental level effects on active travel. Geospatial technologies offer possibilities for capturing environmental exposure and active travel concurrently. We investigated the reliability and the validity of a participatory mapping method in capturing children's active travel. Weekly active school travel of 10- to 12-year-old children (n = 406 in 2020 and 440 in 2021) living in two mid-sized cities in Finland were measured using participatory mapping (Maptionnaire®) and accelerometer (Fibion®). Participatory mapping had moderate reliability for measuring school journey distance (ICC = 0.73) and walking to school (ICC = 0.56), cycling to school (ICC = 0.45), and total active school travel (ICC = 0.55) duration. We found differences between the participatory mapping measured median weekly total active travel (2.07 [IQR 1.34; 3.03]), walking (1.70 [IQR 1.22; 3.03]) and cycling (2.20 [IQR 1.46; 3.01]) duration and accelerometer measured active travel (1.47 [IQR 0.97; 1.99]), walking (1.17 [IQR 0.81; 1.83]) and cycling (1.63 [IQR 1.06; 2.06]) duration. While all the median weekly active travel duration differences were close to 0.5 weekly hours, further analysis showed that the average time differences [lower LoA, upper LoA] were +0.83 h/week [0.66, 1.00] for total active travel to school, +1.07 h/week [0.63, 1.52] for walking to school, and +0.76 h/week [0.58, 0.93] for cycling to school. Participatory mapping serves as a potential method for examining active travel when spatial, experiential and behavioural aspects of active travel are to be considered concurrently. Future research focusing on environmental aspects of active travel and physical activity should consider spatially referenced methods such as participatory mapping alongside other methods. • Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) method captures environmental effects of active travel. • PPGIS serves as a potential tool for longitudinal health-place research. • PPGIS can provide in-depth data on active travel when large samples are needed. • PPGIS tends to slightly overestimate active travel duration.