Examining Differences and Commonalities of Life Cycle Stages in Daily Contacts and Activity-Travel Time Allocation

Abstract

In this paper, the authors employ structural regression models to identify the differences and commonalities among life cycle stages in daily interpersonal contacts and their activity-travel time allocation. The authors use data from a two-day geocoded time use survey that enables the creation of variables depicting daily contacts with family, friends, schoolmates, co-workers, clubmates, and others. The daily contacts, duration of activities by type, and travel time are the endogenous variables of the system. Life-cycle stages, day of the week, and a home-based accessibility indicator are used as exogenous variables. The model identifies a variety of life-cycle dependent roles of interpersonal interactions in activity-travel behavior. Intra-household contacts and friends play important roles in explaining service, shopping, home-leisure, and out of home social activity duration. Moreover, many significant indirect influences are found with this model, demonstrating the necessity of incorporating human interactions as well as the paths of influence among daily activity durations. The authors also compare the direct and indirect influence between two models, one that includes number of daily contacts and a second model without daily contacts. Three groups are found as the most sensitive in allocation of time when controlling for daily contacts and they are children younger than 17 years, persons in home duties, and college students. In addition, allocation of time to discretionary activities is the most sensitive to specifications that control for number of daily contacts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.