ercent. It should be noted, however, that only three of approximately 1,200 parents approached actively denied permission for their child to participate.
MeasuresThe initial item pool that formed the basis of the Perceived Restorative Components Scale for Children (PRCS-C) was drawn from previously published adult measures. With the permission of the first authors, items were adapted for children, from both the RCS by Laumann et al. (2001) and the PRS by Hartig et al. (1997b).
Items were selected on the basis of the following criteria: they should be representative of Kaplan’s restorative components, applicable to children’s environments (i.e., for this study they would make sense in a school setting), comprehended by children or readily adapted for use with children, and they should have loaded onto appropriate factors in prior research involving the development of adult perceived restorative environment measures. Due to adult research published previously, a smaller initial item pool than otherwise was used, minimizing the disruption to participating schools and the required time and effort of children. A primary school teacher and a primary school environmental educator reviewed the final wording of items for suitability with children.
The adapted items comprised 23 questions representing the factors proposed by ART and more specifically, the five factors as reported by Laumann et al. (2001): seven items for Being Away (three for physical and four for psychological), five items for Fascination, six items for Extent and five items for Compatibility.
To ensure children’s responses were directly related to the environments of interest, the survey included more specific phrasing than has been used with adult samples. For example, prior research with adults (e.g., the RCS) asked participants to complete the following item - “I do something different than I usually do when…” while imagining themselves in an environment presented by video. For the PRCS-C, the name of the specific environments (in italics here for identification only) were included in the item, i.e., “When I am in the playground, I do different things than in the classroom” or “The things I like to do can be done in the library.” Although these items contain direct language, it was deemed to be appropriate to facilitate accurate completion by children as young as eight years.
Children were asked to think about how true each statement was for them and to circle the answer that suited them best. The response scale was a five-point Likert scale (0-Not at all, 1-A little, 2-Sometimes, 3-A lot, 4-Completely) with only the words printed across the page under each question for children to circle; that is, there was not a numbered scale on the page. Children readily answered questions by circling the answer appropriate for them. Items for each factor were distributed throughout the questionnaire, so no items for the same factor followed each other.
Questionnaire packages comprised a demographics page (items included grade level, age and sex) and the restorative component items to be completed for both the school playground and the school library. Approximately ten minutes separated the completion of the two sets of restorative component items (i.e., for the two environments) during which timed performance tasks were completed. Children did not exhibit any signs of fatigue and indicated they enjoyed participating in the research. The data presented comes from a larger study designed to evaluate a number of measures for children (i.e., restorative components, attention performance). Only the psychometric evaluation of the PRCS-C is reported here. The items were presented in the same order, but were completed for playground and library in counterbalanced order across schools.
ProcedureAfter the study was approved by the Monash University Ethics Committee and Victorian governing bodies of schools, principals of schools were approached to participate in the study. Children in grades three to six of participating schools received an explanatory statement and consent form f