The Scarborough Survey: An open dataset to explore suburban challenges in Canada

This is the repository of the Scarborough survey, created by the Suburban Mobilities Cluster at UTSC.

Background

While urban regions continue to grow, much of the urbanization that is occurring is better described as suburbanization. This is generating and will continue to generate immense pressure on our social and environmental systems. To address these challenges and exploit specific suburban opportunities, cities globally require a complete understanding of the complexity of how human and environmental systems are uniquely intertwined within suburban contexts. The Suburban Mobilities (SuMo) cluster at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) aims to address these academic and policy challenges, generating transformative, interdisciplinary, partnered research about suburban contexts that will allow communities to solve holistic transportation challenges facing the suburbanized world in the 21st century.

Among the multiple projects developed within the SuMo cluster, one highlight is the design of a survey that allows obtaining multidimensional data on suburban contexts. Multiple data sources have allowed us to characterize the Scarborough area to date: transport networks and trip diaries, locations of amenities, census data, pricing, and land value information, among others. Considering these existing sources, we wondered what information would be helpful to collect in a survey to fill data gaps that would allow a better and deeper characterization of transportation’s impacts on quality of life of people living in Scarborough.

The Scarborough survey stands out for at least three reasons. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale survey specific to Scarborough. Second, this survey involved the community in design. From a bottom-up approach, two listening circles were organized to obtain feedback from diverse Scarborough communities to complement and validate the final questionnaire. Finally, we adopted a multi-channel strategy using social media platforms, survel panels and postal cards for survey recruitment from April to December 2022. We designed a survey addressing six different themes (mobility and built environment, older adults and active transport, health, social capital, political values and automobility) using transportation and equity as a cross-cutting theme, including the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in exacerbating existing barriers and inequalities. We leveraged the interdisciplinarity of the Suburban Mobilities cluster, which includes investigators from 5 different departments: Geography & Planning, Sociology, Health & Society, Political Science, and Management.

What does this repository contain?

In the Confidentiality and Privacy subsection of our Ethics Research Protocol (REB) (“The Scarborough Survey (Suburban Mobilities Cluster)”, #31300), we stated that a smaller set of the data that removes all potentially identifying participant data will be made publicly available.

Therefore, this dataset:

• Contains data for the core section of the survey, alongside a data dictionary for easier use.
• Does not contain addresses but retain the first three digits of postal codes to enable aggregated geographical analysis.

Survey questionnaire

This file contains the full survey questionnaire, organized in different sections.

Survey data

This file contains the answers from 1850 Scarboorugh residents. Only the core section of the survey is available, i.e., Section 2 (mobility and built environment), Section 3 (core module, with several questions about health, social capital and values) and Section 9 (sociodemographic module). We removed addresses but retained the first three digits of postal codes to enable aggregated geographical analysis. This file is password protected to follow our REB (pass: sumosurvey2023).

Additional data can be accessed upon request. This data includes five more sections: Section 4 (Older adults and active transport), Section 5 (Health), Section 6 (Social capital), Section 7 (Political values) and Section 8 (Automobility). If any person wants to have access to the full dataset, please contact Ignacio Tiznado-Aitken (i.tiznadoaitken@utoronto.ca) for further information.

Data dictionary

This file contains all questions, codes, and notes to understand the survey data the best way possible. This file is password protected to follow our REB (pass: sumosurvey2023).

Descriptive figures

This repository includes a folder with simple graphs to visualize aggregated results. Folders "barcharts_sectionX" include one bar chart per each question included in section X: Section 2 (mobility and built environment), Section 3 (core module) and Section 9 (sociodemographic module).

Data paper

If you want to know more about the particularities of the Scarborough context, a suburb in Canada where the survey was applied, and the design process, sampling strategy, representativeness, main descriptive results and ongoing academic articles, please refer to

Credits and Authorship Policy

Please cite the datapaper and dataset as follows:

Tiznado-Aitken, I. & Farber, S. (2024). The Scarborough Survey: An interdisciplinary hybrid instrument to explore suburban challenges in Canada. Suburban Mobilities Cluster, University of Toronto Scarborough. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/s5jxh

Tiznado-Aitken, I. & Farber, S. (2024). The Scarborough Survey: An open dataset to explore suburban challenges in Canada. Available at: https://github.com/SAUSy-Lab/Scarborough-Survey

For projects involving the use of the open version of the Scarborough Survey, please email Ignacio at i.tiznadoaitken@utoronto.ca since we keep track of all projects using this dataset.

For projects involving the use of the full version of the Scarborough Survey (available upon request), Drs. Steven Farber and Ignacio Tiznado-Aitken will be invited to join as co-authors considering their contributions to survey design and data collection. They will review and comment on any draft before going out for publication. For each research project, it will be at the discretion of the authorship team whether Drs. Farber and Tiznado-Aitken will be invited to participate more fulsomely in defining research questions and advising on methods, among other forms of involvement over and above those required above. See more in our Authorship Policy document. Please email Ignacio at i.tiznadoaitken@utoronto.ca for further information.

Academic work using the survey

Here is a list of academic papers, either published or in preparation (latest update: May 2024)

1. Lyeo, J. S., Tiznado-Aitken, I., Farber, S., Brown, H. K., & Spence, N. (2023). Predictors of transportation-related barriers to healthcare access in a North American suburb. Journal of Public Health, 1-12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10389-023-01916-2
2. Jamal, S., Tiznado-Aitken, I., & Farber, S. (2024a). Is online service usage more of a sociodemographic phenomenon? Exploring equity implications of online grocery, e-shopping, and restaurant delivery service usage in a suburban context. Manuscript in preparation.
3. Jamal, S., Tiznado-Aitken, I., & Farber, S. (2024b). Quality of life in the suburbs: Understanding the interplay between affordable housing, neighbourhood quality and accessibility. Manuscript in preparation.
4. Teel, S., Smith, L., & Farber, S. (2024). Mobilities of Care in Scarborough: Analysing caregiving transportation patterns through predictive modelling. Manuscript in preparation.
5. Li, C., Higgins, C., Tiznado-Aitken, I., & Farber, S. (2024). Exploring the relationships between physical accessibility, online shopping, and travel behaviour for grocery shopping in Scarborough, Canada. Manuscript in preparation.
6. Daoleuxay, Y., Silver, D., Jamal, S., Tiznado-Aitken, I., & Farber, S. (2024). A Multivariate Analysis of Scarborough Residents’ Perceptions of Automated Vehicles. Manuscript in preparation.
7. Calderón-Figueroa, F., Jamal, S., Tiznado-Aitken, I. & Farber, S. (2024). Social capital and urban infrastructure in Scarborough. Manuscript in preparation.
8. Khachatryan, A., Voorheis, P., Tiznado-Aitken, I., & Silver, M. (2024). Understanding the Behavioural Determinants of Active Travel Among Older Adults: A Mixed Methods Study. Manuscript under review.
9. Parga, J., Tiznado-Aitken, I., Jamal, S., Yu, A., Farber, S., & Higgins, C. (2024). Accessibility, Perceptions, and Self-Rated Health in the Suburbs: Evidence from Scarborough, Canada. Manuscript under review
10. Farber, S., Higgins, C., Tiznado-Aitken, I., Jamal, S., Parga, J., & Yu, A. (2024). Analyzing access to opportunities, sociodemographic differences, and impacts on quality of life in Scarborough, Canada. Suburban Mobilities Cluster report. Available at: https://assets.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/sf/project/archive/research_6/analyzing-access-to-opportunities-in-scarborough-canada.pdf
11. Tiznado-Aitken, I., Yin, Z. & Farber, S. (2024). Towards sustainable neighbourhoods? Tensions and heterogeneous transport priorities among suburban residents Manuscript in preparation.
12. Yin, Z., Jamal, S. & Farber, S. (2024). The determinants of neighbourhood satisfaction in Scarborough, Canada. Manuscript in preparation.
13. Tiznado-Aitken, I. & Farber, S. (2024). The Scarborough Survey: An interdisciplinary hybrid instrument to explore suburban challenges in Canada. Suburban Mobilities Cluster, University of Toronto Scarborough. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/s5jxh