Paper short abstract:

Children Independent Mobility (CIM) can be defined as ‘the freedom of children to travel around their own neighborhood or city without adult supervision’. we focused on this concept and used the results of a questionnaire survey conducted throughout Japan to understand the CIM in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Children Independent Mobility (CIM) can be defined as ‘the freedom of children to travel around their own neighborhood or city without adult supervision’. CIM is thought of an important factor in the health and physical, social and mental development of children. The first study focusing on CIM was conducted by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) in the UK in 1971, followed by the UK and West Germany in 1990, and 16 countries including the UK, Germany, and Japan in 2010, with annual and international comparisons. These studies used the concept of six licenses. The six licenses were as a behavioral measure of road safety intended to indicate the degree to which children were being removed from exposure to danger. There are nine core questions used as the principal measures of independent mobility of the children studied – six from the adult questionnaire and three from the child questionnaire. These measures were termed ‘licenses’ of independent mobility in PSI’s previous work. However, PSI's 2010 survey of CIM was conducted in only four Japanese cities, and no study has captured CIM for the entire country.

In this study, we focused on this concept of "six licenses" from adults and used the results of a questionnaire survey conducted throughout Japan to understand the CIM in Japan. As a result, we were able to collect more than 90 samples per prefecture in the web-based questionnaire and analyze them by prefecture. We found that the CIM varies by prefecture. In addition, comparing the CIM of children with that of their parents when they were children, we found that the CIM of children has worsened. In all six licenses, children are less free to act on their own than when their parents were children. This result indicates that there are very serious issues.