UNTERWEGS - youth on the way in science and everyday life

UNTERWEGS [on the go, on the move, on the road, on the way, out and about] has the objective to close knowledge gaps regarding the mobility behaviour of youths as well as their attitude to mobility and to evaluate to what extent information can help to direct behaviour and attitudes towards an environmentally friendly mobility which is beneficial to health. The hypotheses is that youths are more willing to change than adults and that interventions to raise their awareness have a comparatively strong impact on them, even if some of these effects only become obvious when teenagers have turned adults and have the choice to use a car or to continue to use environmentally friendly modes of transport. Long term cooperation with the schools involved is desirable to observe the mobility behaviour (panel). The research process will be used to help students in the age group 12 to 14 to better understand science and academic research. The subject ‘mobility’ is ideal for this purpose because it immediately relates to everyday experiences. The research questions, a survey design which is suitable for both age group and genders and the content of the mobility intervention are developed in cooperation with the students; academic guidance is provided for the data gathering, data analysis and the presentation of the results. The survey design is based on a before-after with control group experiment; pupils in two classes will twice investigate their mobility behaviour. One class is used as control group. Between the surveys, pupils of the other class will attend “Intervention Workshops” where the effects of traffic will be discussed and strategies for a sustainable mobility developed. Making them think about their own behaviour and alternatives to this behaviour generates an impulse; in the second survey the effect of this impulse is to be measured. Since gender-specific and location-specific differences are of interest, four schools were selected for this cooperation: one in a central location in a big city, i.e. Vienna (2. district), one at the outskirts of a big city (13. district) and two in more rural areas (Tulln in Austria, Itzehoe in Germany). Homepage: http://jugend-unterwegs.at/