title: Developing and testing a street audit tool using Google Street View to measure environmental supportiveness for physical activity.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Walking for physical activity is associated with substantial health benefits for adults. Increasingly research has focused on associations between walking behaviours and neighbourhood environments including street characteristics such as pavement availability and aesthetics. Nevertheless, objective assessment of street-level data is challenging. This research investigates the reliability of a new street characteristic audit tool designed for use with Google Street View, and assesses levels of agreement between computer-based and on-site auditing.
  
  
  METHODS
  The Forty Area STudy street VIEW (FASTVIEW) tool, a Google Street View based audit tool, was developed incorporating nine categories of street characteristics. Using the tool, desk-based audits were conducted by trained researchers across one large UK town during 2011. Both inter and intra-rater reliability were assessed. On-site street audits were also completed to test the criterion validity of the method. All reliability scores were assessed by percentage agreement and the kappa statistic.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Within-rater agreement was high for each category of street characteristic (range: 66.7%-90.0%) and good to high between raters (range: 51.3%-89.1%). A high level of agreement was found between the Google Street View audits and those conducted in-person across the nine categories examined (range: 75.0%-96.7%).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The audit tool was found to provide a reliable and valid measure of street characteristics. The use of Google Street View to capture street characteristic data is recommended as an efficient method that could substantially increase potential for large-scale objective data collection.
authors: Sport and Health Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
authors: Pippa
authors: P
authors: Griew
authors: Melvyn
authors: M
authors: Hillsdon
authors: Charlie
authors: C
authors: Foster
authors: Emma
authors: E
authors: Coombes
authors: Andy
authors: A
authors: Jones
authors: Paul
authors: P
authors: Wilkinson
mesh_terms: D004777:Environment; D004779:Environment Design; D004954:Esthetics; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D006113:United Kingdom; D016138:Walking
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