 of audio recordings of risk reframing sessions, brief, written participant evaluations, and in-depth interviews with selected teacher and parent volunteers are gathered to understand some of the experiences and observations of the adults participating in the study.
Primary outcomes (activity levels) will be analysed using intention-to-treat principles. The effectiveness of the intervention for increasing activity, changing social skills and after school activities will be measured at both cluster and individual levels. Mixed-effects multi-level regression (STATA/IC 12, http://www.stata.com), taking clustering and repeated measurement of participants into account, will be used to examine net change from baseline values between groups. At the individual level, multivariate regression will be used to examine the contributions of activity level to changes in self-concept and social skills between groups. Secondary analyses will be conducted to explore subgroup effects (e.g., by sex). In addition, the contribution of potential confounders such as BMI will be explored.
Data from the audio recordings of the risk reframing sessions, parent interviews and field notes kept by project staff will be transcribed either in their entirety or as brief written reports. The resulting qualitative data will be converted to text to be analysed according to an adaptation of Charmaz's  approach to social analysis. Initial emergent themes will be identified and data coded for patterns and complexity regarding participants' experiences, actions, beliefs or relationships to risk, assumptions regarding risk, the larger process of which this action or belief is a part, and possible implications of such actions or beliefs for particular actors, institutional forms, parents, families, or children.
During and after each round of data collection, the process is evaluated and the methods of data collection and communication are reassessed to monitor fidelity to the treatment. Teachers' and administrators' perceptions and attitudes are assessed by survey and informal interviews. Photos, videos and onsite observations of the school playgrounds are used to monitor and evaluate the progression of the use of unstructured materials.
Children's obesity, bullying and poor social skills represent a challenge to their mental and physical health. These three are often inter-related, but can be reversed. Many programs aiming at increasing physical activity have been implemented in the last decades, but most of them fail to have the potential to be adopted everywhere anywhere, due to structure, cost and lack of appeal to some children. This project is novel in investigating the benefits of free play on the playground for increasing physical activity and social skills in children and challenging adults to consider how their perceptions of risk may impact children's access to active free play. Due to its scope and potential to be adopted anywhere, if we have positive findings, this project has the prospect to influence policy around school-, and public playgrounds.
Acknowledgements and Funding
This project has received funding for three years from the Australian Research Council (DP0877590) as well as from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (570808).
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