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Investigating 9-11 year-olds’ views about scooters
By Miranda Nixon
Introduction
I chose to research this topic because scooters tend to be forgotten. People think
there are less safety issues. There’s lots of writing about children and cycles and
children and road safety but nothing about children and scooters. I was interested in
whether children chose to come to school by scooter and if so, why. I also wanted to
know what children thought about safety on scooters.
Methodology
Population sample
As it would be too large a group to involve my whole school I had to decide on a small
group. So I thought about all the ages in our school. I thought that it would too difficult
for very young children to read a questionnaire and as I am in Year 6 I thought that it
would be good to research with children of my own age. So I decided to restrict it to Year
5/6 pupils.
First of all, I needed to design a questionnaire that would help me find out children’s
views about scooters; about things like how responsible they were about scooter riding
and about where scooters should be allowed. I also needed to design a way of measuring
how strong these views were. I chose to use some statements like:
‘I think scooters should be allowed in … e.g. parks, schools, shopping malls etc’
I think scooter riders should be more careful about pedestrians walking on the
pavement’ and
‘I think there should be training for scooter riders like there is for cycles’ and ‘I
think scooters are fun’ etc.
The full questionnaire can be found in Appendix 1.
I used a six point measurement scale ‘strongly agree; agree; slightly agree; slightly
disagree; disagree; and strongly disagree’. I specifically did not want to have a ‘don’t
know’ category because I wanted the pupils to show their real view which is why I
included the slightly agree and slightly disagree categories. I then handed it out to the
Year 5/6 pupils and got 34 back. I made a tally of the results and then they were put into
graphs.
Ethics
I thought about the ethics of what I was doing and therefore made the questionnaire
anonymous. I also didn’t want the children to feel obliged to do this so I just left a box
outside the classroom where they could be put anonymously. However, I did want to do a
few follow-up interviews and realised this would be difficult if the questionnaire was
anonymous. So, I attached a separate slip where I asked the participants if they wanted
to be interviewed and this way their reply could be separated from the questionnaire. In
fact I had a separate box for these.
Eight participants volunteered to be interviewed. I used a semi-structured interview
where I asked them all the same main questions. I recorded the interviews on a
Dictaphone, a transcript was made, and I then looked at the data. Semi-structured
means that I asked the same core questions to all of them but also asked other
questions depending on their answers. Here are the core questions I asked.
• How do people react to you as a scooter rider?
• What do you think are the advantages of coming to school on a scooter?
• What do you think are the disadvantages?
• What do you think is the image of people who come to school by scooter?
• Where do you enjoy riding your scooter?
• Do you think there should be some kind of training for scooter riders?
• What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you on your scooter?
The findings
I have turned my results into graphs as it is easier to interpret what children were saying.
Scooters should be allowed in…
16
14
12
10 parks
8
6 schools (but not the
4 playground)
2 pavements
0
shopping malls
e
ee
e
ee
e
ee
re
re
re
gr
gr
gr
ag
ag
ag
sa
sa
sa
ly
tly
di
di
di
ng
gh
ly
tly
ro
ng
sli
gh
st
ro
sli
st
Graph 1
From graph 1 you can see that children are very sensible about scooter riding and
although most agree that they should be allowed in parks, schools and pavements they
disagree that they should be allowed in shopping malls.
Scooters are…
25
20
15 fun
dangerous
10 silly
5
0
strongly agree slightly slightly disagree strongly
agree agree disagree disagree
Graph 2
From graph 2 you can see that very few children think scooters are silly and the majority
do not think they are dangerous but nearly all of the children think they are fun.
scooters should have...
18
16
14
12
10 locks like bikes
8 storage space at school
6
4
2
0
e
ee
e
ee
e
ee
re
re
re
gr
gr
gr
ag
ag
ag
sa
sa
sa
ly
tly
di
di
di
ng
gh
ly
tly
ro
ng
sli
gh
st
ro
sli
st
Graph 3
From graph 3 you can see that almost all the children think that scooters should have
locks and storage space at school.
More children would use scooters if...
18
16
14 they could be locked
12
10
8 there were enough safe
6
4 paths to ride on
2
0
e
ee
e
ee
e
ee
re
re
re
gr
gr
gr
ag
ag
ag
sa
sa
sa
ly
tly
di
di
di
ng
gh
ly
tly
ro
ng
sli
gh
st
ro
sli
st
Graph 4
The last graph shows that more children would use scooters if they could be locked and if
there were enough safe paths to ride on.
Conclusions
This small research study has shown that children are very responsible about scooter
riding more than adults actually notice. Most children want training for scooters, just
like cyclists. Children want adults to be more understanding about them riding on the
pavements. Most of all scooters are better for the environment than cars, and more
children would use them to travel to school if there were safer paths and storage for
them.
