Investigating changes in within-person effects between attitudes and travel behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

R.M. Faber, M.C. de Haas, E.J.E. Molin and M. Kroesen

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2024, vol. 185, issue C

Abstract: Attitudes have been used as explanatory variables of travel behaviour for decades, typically under the assumption that there is a causal effect of attitudes on behaviour. However, recent research has shown that the relationship between attitudes and travel behaviour is bi-directional. In this study we use a longitudinal modelling technique on panel data to 1) separate within-person effects from between-person associations and 2) test whether the within-person effects changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the within-person effects were weaker during the pandemic than they were before the pandemic. In addition, the within-person effects were much smaller than would be expected based on methods that do not separate within-person effects from between-person associations. This means that researchers should be careful when basing policy recommendations on cross-sectional correlations between attitudes and behaviour for two reasons: first, the problem of endogeneity, and second, the highly relevant separation of within-person effects from between-person relations.

Keywords: Attitudes; Structural equations modelling; Travel behavior research; Netherlands mobility panel; RI-CLPM; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2024.104127

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