Rejoinder to parental attitudes to children's journeys to school by Mary Sissons Joshi and Morag MacLean

Abstract

Joshi and MacLean claim that the 1990 study by Adams, Whitelegg and myself (Hillman et al., 1990) employed a carelessly-worded questionnaire which produced misleading findings and that this has serious consequences in terms of interpreting the reasons given by parents for restricting their children's independence. Their reservations about the validity of the conclusions of our study stem from their observation that the parents in our survey were asked only for the main reason for the restrictions rather than being provided with the opportunity to cite multiple reasons. In their view, this explains why they found that "stranger danger" is a more common reason than our finding that "fear of a road accident" is more common. In an attempt to justify their judgement, they contrast the pattern of school journeys in their survey area in Oxford City and Oxfordshire in 1993 with ours by abstracting data from one of our 1990 survey areas, namely Nottingham, which the 1991 Census shows to have had a similar rate of car ownership to their survey area. What they seem to overlook is the fact that the differences in our findings on this issue are more likely to be accounted for by several important factors other than that parents in our survey were limited to providing only the main reason for imposing restrictions.