UAB professor conducting park study

If you spot someone sitting at a park with a clipboard this year, there’s no reason to panic. Most likely they’re part of UAB occupational therapy professor and Mountain Brook resident Gavin Jenkins’ park study.

Over the course of a year, beginning in January, Jenkins and a team of 15 occupational therapy graduate students will observe activity in Mountain Brook parks. They will be at Overton Park, Jemison Park and Cahaba River Walk to research park usage. The study, Jenkins said, could have many applications for the Mountain Brook community.

“For someone like the city of Mountain Brook, to me that data might allow them to make decisions in terms of future planning,” Jenkins said.

If the study shows certain portions of the park get more use, for example, Jenkins said the city could consider that when adding more parks or renovating existing ones.

“Our goal is to understand how people use those three parks, what goes on in those three parks across a period of time,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins decided to study Mountain Brook parks for several reasons, including the variety of parks offered in the community as well as the safety of the area. He settled on the three parks based on their range of offerings. 

Overton Park is a “containerized” park, Jenkins said, because it is a fenced-in area with manmade structures. Jemison Park, however, has a more natural landscape and more open areas. Then Cahaba River Walk, the city’s newest park, offers a boat launch and swimming area for warmer months in addition to a walking trail and pavilion.

Graduate students will be at the parks asking park-goers to wear GPS belts and accelerometers during the study. They’ll aim for a random sampling of park users, coming at different times of the day and different times of the week.

“What that allows us to do is it will allow us to see where they go in the parks, and then it will allow us to see how much energy they expel,” Jenkins said. “Are they active in parks, or are they passive?” 

Jenkins said he has a few expectations — such as seeing more walkers, runners and joggers at Jemison Park and more families using the playground at Overton Park — but past research has also told him not to rely too much on expectations. While there are predictable activities at certain parts of the day, Jenkins said there are also chunks of time that aren’t usually researched.

“That to me is an exciting thing about a park, that a park has this sort of multidimensional use, and what does the community want of it,” Jenkins said.

After the first month of the study, they will use GPS data to focus energy on more concentrated areas. This goal is to observe how people use park areas, rather than what individuals are doing, Jenkins said.

“What I’m looking to see is, OK those people were engaged in some sort of social interaction, in discussions,” Jenkins said. “Those people were engaged in a kind of leisure activity because they were having a picnic … I’m not really interested in you as an individual, but do I see a lot of people in this area having picnics.”

No one can be forced to participate in the study, Jenkins said, and if someone says that don’t want to wear the GPS belt, that is OK. However, he said he hopes the lack of personal information taken will lead people to be more willing to participate. While park users will be asked basic demographic information — age, gender and how often they use parks — there will be no identifying personal information or follow-up.

“That’s part of the philosophy that I’m not interested in what you do,” Jenkins said. “Once I get 10 people doing roughly what you’re doing, now I’m interested.”

Jenkins said he hopes that at the end of a year, the study will benefit Mountain Brook as well as other communities. There is not much research on how parks are used, and he said this study could provide information about future developments.

“The whole goal of doing this research is to try and understand the importance of these areas to the community,” Jenkins said, “and ultimately how can you make them really serve a community so that when you, when people look at the city budget … people can look at parks and say, ‘Absolutely it’s worth every penny we’re spending on it.’”