CYFC Scholars
Program
Yingling Fan
Neighborhood Design, Family Activities and Family Well Being
Abstract
The old practices of sprawling, fragmented
development have distanced American families from various activity
opportunities. Nowadays,
many parents in the US spend more time in traffic than playing
with their children. As
family activities are essential to child development, lack of
family-oriented activities is likely to pose a serious threat
to child health and school performance.
“Neighborhood Design, Family Activities,
and Child Well-Being” presents an effort of seeking neighborhood
design and place-making solutions for promoting family activities
and improving child well-being. The
research goal is three-fold: 1) identifying ecological factors
of family activity engagement and child well-being, 2) designing
and implementing a community-engaged built environment intervention
in order to promote family-oriented activities, and 3) formally
testing the causality among neighborhood design, family activities,
and child well-being.
Corresponding to the research aims, the project will have three phases. In
Phase I, the research team will recruit a sample of families
with school children through K-12 schools in the Twin Cities. Advanced
data collection techniques such as GPS-enabled personal digital assistants will be employed to collect
three sets of data from each participating family, including
neighborhood characteristics, individual attributes, and week-long
activity information. The collected data will be analyzed to
identify potential determinants of family activity participation
and child well-being, which will serve as a fact base for designing
the neighborhood intervention program (Phase II) and for conducting
the causality study (Phase III).
In Phase II, the research team will utilize
the analysis results in Phase I and apply a community-engaged
approach to design and implement a neighborhood built environment
intervention. Focusing on a specific neighborhood, the
research team will begin with community outreach efforts and
fully implement a participatory design process to ensure a community-appropriate
and responsive intervention. The
basic functionality of the intervention will reflect widely-used
features of neighborhood revitalization programs (e.g., adding
social gathering places and installing recreational facilities),
and will be carefully tailored to emphasize the needs of families
with school-age children.
In Phase III, a before-after comparison
study will be conducted on a matched neighborhood pair, including
the intervened neighborhood in Phase II and a second neighborhood
that has similar socio-demographics and contexts to the intervened
neighborhood. Before- and after-intervention data will
be collected to examine whether the positive built environment
intervention improves child health and school performance by
increasing child engagement in family activities.
