Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jun 19, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 20, 2024 - Aug 15, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 22, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Measuring adult health and well-being outcomes associated with nature contact in parks and other forms of protected areas: a scoping review protocol
ABSTRACT
Background:
Growing evidence shows various health and well-being benefits from nature contact in parks and other forms of protected areas. Methods to measure these outcomes lack systematic identification, critical appraisal, and synthesis.
Objective:
This scoping protocol details the methodology for a scoping review of the instruments that measure health and well-being linked to nature contact in protected areas, including their psychometric properties.
Methods:
A multidisciplinary team will conduct the review following PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Eight databases will be searched for peer-reviewed literature measuring the mental health and well-being outcomes associated with direct nature contact in protected areas among adults over 18 years of age. All retrieved sources will be screened using clearly identified inclusion/exclusion criteria. Psychometric properties of instruments used in included studies will be analyzed.
Results:
The scoping review will provide an organized summary of quantitative and qualitative instruments for measuring mental health and well-being outcomes, offering a starting point from which to critically examine the validity and consistency of such methods, helping researchers choose the best tool to assess outcomes.
Conclusions:
Findings will aid in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of current measurement approaches to mental health and well-being outcomes of nature contact and may be used to guide future research on this topic. Clinical Trial: n/a
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.