01155036

Component

This paper focuses on the role of social interaction in social and recreational trip making. It extends the existing literature in the area of travel and social networks in that it recognizes the fact that individuals have multiple social networks (family, friends, associational and professional) and that social networks potentially fulfill multiple roles (providing/receiving help, companionship, skills, dissemination of knowledge). Using an existing Dutch data set containing information on engagement in social and recreational activities for various ethnic groups, ordered response models of frequency of engagement in these activities were estimated. The estimation results suggest that in general, higher frequency of contact with family and friends and associational memberships of any kind lead to more frequent involvement in many leisure and recreation activities. Notably, the effects of higher involvement in a particular social network are often not domain specific. For instance, membership of a sports club leads to a higher frequency of seeing a movie or going to a restaurant, while more frequent contacts with friends lead to a higher frequency of seeing a play or sporting. This suggests that various functions of social network links (getting information about what one could/should do, as well as providing companionship) are not tied to specific types of networks, and that specific types of networks fulfill various functions. It is also noted that the causality may be reverse, in the sense that joint recreational activities serve to maintain social network links in order to keep access to social capital.

01147878

10-1610

English

25p

2010

Transportation Research Board 89th Annual Meeting

DVD

References; Tables (4)

Activity choices; Ethnic groups; Recreation; Social factors; Travel patterns; Travel surveys

Social networking

Activity based modeling; Activity participation

Netherlands

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2010 Paper #10-1610

TRIS, TRB

Jan 25 2010 10:43AM