There were a number of limitations faced during the completion of this project, the most significant of which was the time constraint of the academic semester. It was requested that the scope of the project encompass all the municipalities’ within Metro Vancouver. This had to be narrowed to one municipality in order to undertake a thorough study with meaningful results. Even just focusing on the parks in Vancouver would have been too time consuming. With 264 parks and 111 public schools, five people physically and digitally auditing these spaces would have taken to much time. As a result our sample size was reduced to roughly 12% of the play spaces in the City of Vancouver.
Play space typology was another limitation faced in this study. Sanctioned parks and public elementary schools were the only spaces included, therefore informal play spaces like forests, cul-de-sacs, and community centers where not included in the analysis. The guidelines in the 7Cs made it difficult to assess these types of locations.
Due to the fact that the 7Cs was geared towards play spaces that have play equipment, parks made for the purpose of sports, or as a open area would score much lower, even though the park was intended for used other than playground equipment.
The 7C’s audit checklist was originally designed for 3 year olds. The slightly modified version was made to accommodate the needs of 10 – 14 year olds, but still lacked assessments that were relevant to that age group in terms of risky play.
Another concern that was raised during the audit process was the subjective
nature of the checklist and the unavoidable human aspect during rating. Different
auditors would rate different features based on their perception, as there was no rigid
metric for rating different elements of the checklist. It was noted that aspects
such as mood and weather contributed to the rating process.
In terms of data acquisition limitations including the exclusion of sidewalk data for the walkability index as it was not available, nor was any data regarding informal networks like trails and paths. Both of these elements increase connectivity and would have contributed to a different result in the walkability index.
Another limitation was the National Household Survey in 2011, which was a
voluntary survey. The voluntary nature of this survey could be seen as problematic
because certain demographics may opt out of completing the survey due to
socioeconomic circumstance.