Neighborhood environment walkability scale: A scoping review

Introduction: The Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) stands out as a tool for assessing environmental walkability. Thus, this scoping review aims to identify studies that have used NEWS and assess the circumstances in which it was used, such as the study country and its income, year of publication, as well as administration methods, versions, and adaptations of the tool. Method: Amidst 83 articles analyzed in PubMed and Scopus databases. We used proportion to describe how the tool was used in general. Data were further stratified into different groups to understand the use of the tool in different contexts. Results: 66 report the use of NEWS for research, and 17 report exclusively translation, validation, and tool reliability testing. The country that published the most studies using NEWS was the United States, followed by Brazil and China, Belgium, and Australia. In high-income countries, 78.2% of the studies report collecting data by self-administration of the questionnaire by the individual, in middle-income countries, 52% of the studies obtained the answers through interviews (mostly face-to-face). Of the studies using the original version of NEWS, 51.7% didn't use the complete questionnaire. Limitations such as difficulty in understanding the Likert scale by individuals, restriction of measurement of environments different from those commonly found in western and high-income countries, as well as the high number of questions, were identified as a pretext for changes to the questionnaire to increase its uptake. Conclusion: These results provide suggestions for the improvement of walkability assessment tools in middle-income countries.

Automated summary

The Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) has been widely used for research, translation, and validation, with the United States being the country that published the most studies using NEWS. In high-income countries, self-administration of the questionnaire for data collection is more common.