Measuring the satisfaction about child-friendly urban spaces(Case study: parks in Bushehr City)

Urban environments are often affected by the types of pollution, unsafe sidewalks, and high crime rates that affect children's social and psychological development. In Bushehr, like in many developing cities, children's rights in the urban space are ignored. Therefore, in this study, an attempt has been made to examine the level of satisfaction of children and their parents about urban parks and to provide solutions to improve the conditions of parks based on the indicators of a child-friendly city.

In this research, first, through a review of internationally valid texts, the underlying variables of creating a child-friendly urban space have been extracted. Then, the reliability was confirmed according to the Cronbach's alpha test value (0.941) and the validity of the questions was checked through interviews with experts. Then, through a questionnaire survey, children's opinions about these variables were measured.
Factor analysis technique has been used to construct the theory of child-friendly city and to get its constituent factors. Considering p = q = 0.5 and maximum error of 7%, the sample size was calculated with the Cochran's formula of 196 people, which was distributed in approximately 200 questionnaires in four parks, each park has a share of 50 questionnaires. Respondents were children aged 6 to 11, of whom 108 were boys and 92 were girls. After completing the questionnaires, the following data were entered into SPSS software and analyzed using the exploratory factor analysis model. The output of the model categorizes and summarizes the variables under several homogeneous factors. The relationship between factors and children's overall satisfaction with the parks has been evaluated using a multiple linear regression model.

According to the findings 5 factors were identified as explaining the child-friendly urban space for Bushehr. The total cumulative variance of these 5 extraction factors is 67.5. These factors include "liveliness", "efficiency", "security", "readability" and "controllability". Also, the results show theMaadar park has a significant advantage over other parks and Shaghab Park has been associated with the lowest score. Shaghab Park is markedly weak in the fourth (Readability) and fifth (controllability) factors.

Accrding to the research findings the intervention strategies in the parks can be adjusted based on the variables related to each factor and it was expected that the situation of the child-friendly atmosphere in the parks would be improved by upgrading the variables. Achieving this can, in addition to reducing social tensions and anomalies, strengthen the sense of security of children and parents,increase the satisfaction of park users, ultimately lead to more people and promote vitality in parks and other urban spaces.