01128745

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2105-05

http://scholar.google.com...occi&publication_year=2009

The surveying of travel behavior changes toward more sustainable mobility practices raises many methodological questions. First is the choice of method, determining how to analyze these behavioral changes via their contextual, temporal, and multifactor dynamics, while attempting to control possible biases. This paper proposes an examination of the use of qualitative methods through two empirical research projects and finds that the order and content of the interview protocol questions can potentially bias the responses. This behavior can be observed specifically with respect to the weight of the dominant social norm (the phenomenon of “social desirability”) and the production of justifications when discrepancies appear between practices described and stated environmental beliefs. One particularity of the qualitative method, reinterviewing the subjects, provides many advantages for analyzing both the process of change and the effects of the interview. Indeed, the interview itself may play a part in modifying subjects’ attitudes and behaviors: it can provoke changes in individuals’ responses and can modify their attitudes toward a topic, causing them to think about the interview. In fact, the interview itself can transmit information and thus encourage a change of practices. Finally, the results are discussed with reference to experimental programs for voluntary travel behavior change.

01141653

09-1912

English

pp 37-43

2009

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309126205

Print

References (42)

Attitudes; Behavior modification; Case studies; Interviewing; Social factors; Travel behavior; Travel surveys

Bias (Psychology)

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 30 2009 6:11PM

• Bayesian Training and Committees of State-Space Neural Networks for Online Travel Time Prediction
• Development of Geolocation Data Compression for Transportation Target Identification
• Distributed Approach for Estimation of Dynamic Origin–Destination Demand
• Driver-Assisted Bus Interview: Passive Transit Travel Survey with Smart Card Automatic Fare Collection System and Applications
• Efficiency and Effectiveness of Cell Phone Samples in Transportation Surveys
• Forecasting Network Data: Spatial Interpolation of Traffic Counts from Texas Data
• Generating Internationally Comparable Figures on Long-Distance Travel for Europe
• Household Travel Surveys with GPS: An Experiment
• Improving the Usability of a Complex Household Travel Survey: An Evaluation of User Requirements
• Kinematic Terrestrial Light-Detection and Ranging System for Scanning
• Measuring and Estimating Suppressed Travel with Enhanced Activity–Travel Diaries
• Model-Based Synthesis of Household Travel Survey Data in Small and Midsize Metropolitan Areas
• Participatory Geographic Information Systems and Active Transportation: Collecting Data and Creating Change
• Processing Raw Data from Global Positioning Systems Without Additional Information
• Transport and Surveillance Aspects of Location-Based Services
• Vehicle Detection from Satellite Images: Intensity-, Chromaticity-, and Lane-Based Method