An Abbreviated Survey to Assess the Accessibility of Community Based Physical Activity for People with Limited Mobility

Research Objectives: To understand the perceptions of an abbreviated survey to rate the accessibility of community-based physical activity for individuals with limited mobility.

Design: Volunteer adults with limited mobility and community-based physical activity professionals participated in online focus group interviews. Participants were shown a draft of the survey and accompanying scoring system and asked open ended questions regarding the clarity, appropriateness, cohesiveness of questions, and scoring tiers. The audio-recorded focus group interviews were transcribed as verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis approach with two separate coders. The survey’s proposed revisions were checked with participants from each focus group.

Setting: Four remote ZOOM focus group interviews

Participants: Sixteen participants who were either an adult who reported having a disability that limits their mobility, or a full-time professional that works at a physical activity site

Interventions: Not applicable

Main Outcome Measures: Themes and subthemes extracted from participant responses to guiding questions

Results: Based on the >97% intercoder agreement (very good), several themes emerged. Participants considered a strength of the survey to be the ability of questions to differentiate levels of accessibility for varying limitations. Participants suggested that we include more visual symbols to reduce confusion and reduce the number of questions further to reduce time commitment. Participants considered the scoring scale to be easy to understand and usable; however, increased clarity in the difference between the middle score tiers would be helpful. Further research is warranted to measure psychometric properties of the survey.

Conclusions: This work highlights the importance of accessibility of community-based physical activity to enable individuals with limited mobility to fully participate in society. The survey has been revised with key stakeholder feedback. Future research to assess the survey’s psychometric properties is warranted.

Author(s) Disclosures: There are no conflict of interest associated with this study for any of the authors.