Environmental Assessment of Public Recreation Spaces (EAPRS)
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| Jackson Hill Playground |
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| Winton Commons Playground |
There is a growing interest in factors in the environment that either encourage or discourage children's physical activity. Public recreation space, including parks and playgrounds, is one of the settings in which children are or could be physically active. However, no two parks are exactly alike and there are few measures that exist to assess the physical environment (e.g., What exists in the park? Are the things in the park of good quality?) of parks and playgrounds.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Active Living Research Program, EAPRS was designed to:
- develop a comprehensive inventory that will allow researchers to catalog the physical environment elements and corresponding characteristics of public recreation spaces (PRS) through direct observation of PRS and
- test the reliability and use of this inventory by independent raters within a sample of public parks and playgrounds in Hamilton County, Ohio.
These aims were achieved by:
- having park/recreation professionals from the Ohio Park and Recreation Association and frequent park users complete surveys about what they see as the physical environment of parks and playgrounds and
- creating a comprehensive tool from these survey responses and having independent raters visit and use this inventory to rate 92 parks/playgrounds in Hamilton County (greater Cincinnati area), Ohio.
This study included the co-investigators Drs. Auffrey, Frank, Whitaker, and Burdette.
We are using the EAPRS tool in our on-going work in environmental influences on the physical activity of children, adolescents, adults, and older adults. The EAPRS tool (Adobe PDF, 437k) and instructions (Adobe PDF, 44k) are available for other investigators to use. Check back to see updated tools and instructions based on our on-going work.
View a picture guide by selecting from the following:
Sections A, B [Adobe PDF, 938k] Section C-F [Adobe PDF, 505k] Sections G-K [Adobe PDF, 539k] Sections L-N [Adobe PDF, 1.15MB] Sections O, P [Adobe PDF, 345k]
