Planned intervention: On Wednesday April 3rd 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for up to 2-10 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published February 19, 2021 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Testing the reliability and effectiveness of a new tool for assessing urban blue spaces: The BlueHealth environmental assessment tool (BEAT)

  • 1. Chair of Landscape Architecture, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Kreutzwaldi 56/3, 51006, Tartu, Estonia b
  • 2. European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter Medical School, Knowledge Spa, Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, Cornwall, TR1 3HD, UK

Description

In order to understand how blue spaces may influence health-promoting behaviours, a reliable and effective assessment tool is needed. The Blue Health Environment Assessment Tool (BEAT) was developed to meet this need. A two-stage approach to testing the reliability of the tool is presented here. At Stage-1, one common and several different expert assessors rated 16 sites independently and their results compared. In Stage-2, two as- sessors rated 21 sites independently and their results were compared. The Inter-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated to assess inter-rater reliability to both stages. Stage-2 results showed greater reliability after enhanced training of the assessors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool at revealing differences between sites and for identifying health promoting affordances we carried out intra and inter-site comparisons of a subset of six sites for the Stage-1 and 18 sites for Stage-2. The results showed that overall the tool performs consistently and compares well to the reliability shown by other similar tools. The tool is also highly effective in identifying site-specific differences across the test sample of blue spaces. The results demonstrate that the tool can be used reliably (with training and guidance) and that it provides meaningful data to help planners and designers assess different sites.

Files

Pre-proof version BEAT 2.pdf

Files (6.1 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:d5df51f76f8c2e5a3e209dc78e5d5109
6.1 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Funding

BlueHealth – Linking Up Environment, Health and Climate for Inter-sector Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in a Rapidly Changing Environment 666773
European Commission