A computerized household activity scheduling survey

Sean Doherty and Eric Miller

Transportation, 2000, vol. 27, issue 1, 75-97

Abstract: Household activity scheduling is widely regarded as the underlying mechanism through which people respond to emerging travel demand management policies. Despite this, very little fundamental research has been conducted into the underlying scheduling process to improve our understanding and ability forecast travel. The experimental survey approach presented in this paper attempts to fill this gap. At the core of the survey is a Computerized Household Activity Scheduling (CHASE) software program. The program is unique in that it runs for a week long period during which time all adult household members login daily to record their scheduling decisions as they occur over time. An up-front interview is used to define a household's activity agenda and mode availability. A sample of 41 households (66 adults and 14 children) was used to assess the performance of the survey. Analysis focuses on times to completion, daily scheduling steps, activity-travel patterns, and scheduling time horizons. Overall, the results show that the computer-based survey design was successful in gathering an array of information on the underlying process, while minimizing the burden on respondents. The survey was also capable of tracing traditionally observed activity-travel outcomes over a multi-day period with minimal fatigue effects. The paper concludes with a detailed discussion on future survey design, including issues of instrument bias, use of the Internet, and improved tracing of spatial behaviour. Future use of the survey methodology to enhance activity-travel diary surveys and stated responses experiments is also discussed. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: activity scheduling; computers; respondent burden; survey methods; travel behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1005231926405 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:transp:v:27:y:2000:i:1:p:75-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1005231926405

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().