Switching commuters from car to public transit: a micro modelling approach

This paper examines the perceptions and values of commuters in Toronto concerning public transit and the private car. Interviews were conducted at an office location readily accessible by car, bus or subway. Respondents were characterized by their predominant commuting mode and provided ratings of the perceived benefits of the modes available. Respondents then completed a conjoint analysis task designed to estimate their trade-offs, or the extent to which they were prepared to sacrifice on one aspect of a commuting journey in order to gain on another. The conjoint analysis used a fractional factorial design allowing main effects and two way interactions to be estimated.The conjoint analysis methodology is used to develop benefit segments and evaluate methods of marketing public transit.     

区域一体化下的广州市居民城际通勤特征分析

在区域一体化背景下,随着区域基础设施的日益完善、区域产业分工与合作格局的形成,区域内城市间的人口流动日益密集,城际通勤者的队伍正日益壮大,并成为检验和分析区域一体化格局的研究对象。本文以广州为案例,。在分析城际通勤基本特征的基础上,从交通设施、社会经济背景和制度政策因素等角度,分析城际通勤的影响机制。认为,交通设施决定通勤方式,反映于通勤时间,制约出行一时间比率;社会经济背景属性影响城际通勤,家庭结构越复杂、工作职务和收入水平越低,其出行一时间比率越大,“行政区”经济、市场化改革等制度政策因素也对城际通勤产生影响。并从完善交通设施、优化基础设施布局、改善城市与区域规划、促进公共服务设施均衡配置等方面提出相关政策建议。     

‘It's a magnifying glass for your relationship’: a thematic analysis of motivations,benefits, and challenges in consensually non-monogamous relationships

The last decade has seen an increase in public and academic interest in consensual non-monogamy (CNM). CNM involves sexual and/or romantic relationships between multiple partners, with the consent of all individuals involved. Engagement in CNM is estimated at 5% of the general population, although due to stigma with the strong idealisation of monogamy in many cultures, it is a hidden population. This qualitative study explores the motivations, benefits, and challenges experienced in CNM relationships, an area that has been understudied despite the resurgence of interest in it. While previous research has mainly focused on comparisons between CNM and monogamy or individual types of CNM such as polyamory, this study seeks to provide a broader understanding of CNM relationships. We employ a critical realist framework and thematically analyse semi-structured interviews with eight participants. The results identify three overarching themes: mononormativity and cultural norms; growth and responsibility; and diversity and complexity; each has several subthemes. These findings suggest that CNM provides opportunities for greater diversification of needs and increased community and individual growth. The study also highlights the challenges experienced in CNM relationships and the strategies used to manage them, such as personal responsibility for managing difficult emotions and temporarily closing a relationship at times for relationship security. A novel finding in this study is that some individuals involved in CNM have internalised cultural norms and the idealisation of monogamy and need to unlearn these norms. This study adds to the existing knowledge on CNM and is expected to be of interest to clinicians and researchers seeking to understand its motivations, benefits, and challenges. Relationship therapists will benefit from increased knowledge of how to work with clients interested or engaged in CNM relationships. Overall, this study supports previous findings that CNM is a viable, enjoyable, yet sometimes challenging type of relationship.     

Feedback-conditional regret theory and testing regret-aversion in risky choice

Regret is an aversive emotion experienced upon the discovery that, had a different choice been made, a higher level of utility would have obtained than actually did. Because regret can be anticipated prior to choice it can lead to regret-minimising decisions. It has been shown that the experience of post-decisional regret is generally dependent on discovering the outcome of foregone acts as well as chosen acts. The most popular version of regret theory does not include an explicit account of the impact of foregone act resolution on anticipated regret-aversion as a decision motive. This restricts its domain of applicability. This paper modifies regret theory to accommodate the impact of outcome feedback on anticipated regret-aversion. The theoretical and empirical implications of this new version of regret theory are discussed.     

VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES AND DAILY HAPPINESS IN THE UNITED STATES

This article analyzes differences in daily happiness between those individuals in the United States who perform voluntary activities during the day and those who do not. Using the Well‐Being Module of the American Time Use Survey 2010, we find that those who devote any time to voluntary activities during the day report higher levels of daily happiness than those who do not. Comparing the happiness obtained from a range of activities, we find that volunteering is among the most enjoyable, indicating that time spent on voluntary activities is utility‐enhancing. We document that the effect of voluntary activities on the experienced utility of individuals can be decomposed into a “time‐composition” effect and an “activity” effect, with the latter explaining between 11% and 46% of the observed difference. (JEL D13, J16, J22)     

The role of affective choice mode in the consumer purchase of expressive products

Based on Zajonc's (1980) thesis, a concept of Affective Choice Mode is developed. It is argued that when products are expressive (i.e., they are sought for psycho-social goals rather than for utilitarian goals), then the predominant mode of consumer brand selection is the affective choice mode. This mode is contrasted with the traditionally assumed information processing mode. Using survey data from 192 consumers and employing LISREL analyses it is shown that (a) although involvement leads to information processing, (b) expressiveness makes affective choice mode more likely, which in turn (c) suppresses information processing. Research and managerial implications of the present work are discussed.     

An international meta-analysis of values of travel time savings

Values of travel time savings are often used in cost–benefit analysis of transport projects and policies, and also to compute generalised travel costs. There has been considerable debate as to whether different research methods (e.g. stated versus revealed preference) will lead to different values of travel time savings, and which segmentations (e.g. by income or mode) are most important to capture the heterogeneity in these values. In addition there are many countries where no specific valuation studies have been done. In this paper new equations are estimated on the outcomes of value of travel time savings studies from various countries. In the data set, several countries appear more than once, which is taken into account by estimating random effects panel models. The meta-analysis sheds some new light on the variation of the value of travel time savings by income, country, travel purpose, mode, distance and by survey method. Furthermore, the resulting meta-models are applied to produce new values of travel time savings for business travel, commuting and for other purposes in passenger transport, for 25 European Union Member states. Similar methods could be used to statistically analyse studies carried out on other non-monetary effects, both for transport and non-transport projects, and for inclusion in cost–benefit analysis.     

Do work commutes moderate the association between perceived neighborhood disorder and psychological distress?

ABSTRACT

Although numerous studies show that living in a neighborhood that is characterized by disorder (crime and dilapidation) can be psychologically distressing, very few studies have considered the element of exposure time or duration of exposure to adverse neighborhood environments. In this paper, we explore the intersection of commuting, mental health, and the subjective experience of neighborhood disadvantage and impoverished community life. Using data from the Welfare, Children, and Families project (2001), a probability sample of 1057 low-income women with children living in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, we test whether the association between neighborhood disorder and psychological distress is moderated or attenuated by commuting time and distance. Our results show that although neighborhood disorder is associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, and somatization, disorder tends to be less distressing for residents who are able to spend time away from these environments through longer commuting times and distances. In other words, working away from one’s neighborhood of residence may help to mitigate the adverse psychological consequences of neighborhood disorder. Our findings support previous research on the stress process and neighborhood disorder. Our work builds on the commuting literature by re-conceptualizing commuting time and distance as protective resources for disadvantaged populations.     

Commuting and the rural-urban hierarchy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the relation between commuting and the settlement structure, with particular attention to rural and nonmetropolitan areas. I examined commuting flows between metropolitan central cities, other metropolitan areas, nonmetropolitan places with more than 10,000 people, those with 2500–10000 people, and other rural areas. Despite the deconcentration of population, industry and trade that was especially marked in the 1970s, commuting in 1980 was predominantly toward larger places in the ruralurban hierarchy, and particularly from rural areas and the other metropolitan category to cities. Overall levels of commuting were high, and most were within either nonmetropolitan or metropolitan areas. Smaller nonmetropolitan places particularly had high proportions of both in- and out-commuters. Differences in commuting flows by gender, socioeconomic status and industry were small, but generally in the directions expected on the basis of prior research. The findings reveal a high degree of work-residence interdependence among settlement units in nonmetropolitan America, with social and economic differences in commuting flows representing an important aspect of community structure.     

Quality of prediction: A critique of Bronner

In this comment on Bronner's article ‘Decision style in transport mode choice’ two problems are discussed. The first and minor one deals with the choice of criterion in the model tests for the quality of prediction. The second and major problem concerns the invalidity of the model tests, which is due to the psychometrically incorrect classification procedure adopted by Bronner. This issue is extensively discussed because some of Bronner's conclusions can be shown to evolve from his incorrect assignment procedure.As an alternative method of attitude assignment the use of a matching constant is suggested. In order to evaluate predictive quality of models, it is recommended to consider mode choice as the criterion variable instead of attitudes within travel mode categories.     

From Clinician to Researcher: The Challenges and Rewards

After many enjoyable years of practice, I made a decision to retire, and felt the need for new but related interests. I knew it was going to be research because I have long considered the progress of my clinical work from that aspect. As a student, I had been trained in quantitative method, and I expected to experience a culture shock when ‘permitted’ to relax my previous research mode, with its dependence on statistical approaches based on preemptive hypotheses, to undertake a qualitative methodology novel to me.     

The Ties That Bind: Midlife Parents' Daily Experiences With Grown Children

Daily pleasant or stressful experiences with grown children may contribute to parental well‐being. This diary study focused on midlife parents' (N = 247) reports regarding grown children for 7 days. Nearly all parents (96%) had contact with a child that week via phone, text, or in person. Nearly all parents shared laughter or enjoyable interactions with grown children during the study week. More than half of parents experienced stressful encounters (e.g., child got on nerves) or stressful thoughts about grown children (e.g., worrying, fretting about a problem). Pleasant and stressful experiences with grown children were associated with parents' positive and negative daily moods. A pleasant experience with a grown child the same day as a stressful experience mitigated effects of those stressful experiences on negative mood, however. The findings have implications for understanding intergenerational ambivalence and stress buffering in this tie.     

Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in the Airline Industry

Following Hochschild's The Managed Heart, which emphasized the problematic features that emotional labour had for women flight attendants, a critical literature emerged which focused on the more enjoyable aspects of emotional labour in service employee experience. This article draws on this literature and analyses emotional labour as a gendered cultural performance but takes issue with the individualizing and pluralistic tenor in the post‐Hochschild discussions. Using a qualitative and quantitative study of nearly 3000 Australian flight attendants, it focuses on organizational and occupational health and safety variables, as well as sexual harass‐ment and passenger abuse — factors barely discussed by Hochschild's critics. The qualitative data indicate that emotional labour is both pleasurable and difficult at different times for the same individual. Gender is still pivotal, as Hochschild suggested, linking emotional labour with sexual harassment. At the same time, the most significant predictors from the quantitative study of whether emotional labour would be costly were organizational. Variables such as whether flight attendants felt valued by the company show that the airline management context is highly influential in the way in which emotional labour is experienced. As a means of understanding the complex relations in this important and eroticized area of service work where flight attendants, airline crews, airline management and passengers have convergent and conflicting interests, the article also deploys a new concept: ‘demanding publics’, to refer to trangressions of the legitimate boundaries of the service worker.     

THE JOURNEY TO WORK AND GENDER INEQUALITY IN EARNINGS:

It has been well documented that women tend to work closer to home than men. One interpretation of this finding has been that women face more spatially constrained labor markets than men, and these constraints are thought to be a factor in the gender gap in earnings. A recent study of Tel Aviv, Israel, by Moshe Semyonov and Noah Lewin-Epstein (1991) also found that working women clearly tend to hold employment more in the vicinity of their homes than do men. The observed deficits in earnings by employed women were thought to be exchanged for compliance with traditional gender-role expectations. Our study cross-validates key portions of the Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein study for the United States by examining the location of labor markets and their relationship to gender inequality in earnings in the 1988 wave of the NLSY panel database. Using annual earnings as the dependent variable and other similarly defined variables, we parallel their multiple regression analysis. The time-to-work reports of NLSY panel members are used to assess their commuting behavior and the results of this analysis are compared across four types of residential locations: rural, small urban, suburban, and large central city. We modestly confirm the gender inequalities in earnings produced by differential commuting behaviors for men and women but cannot fully generalize them to a broad set of residentially defined labor markets. For instance, women in suburban settings do have a higher return in earnings from time spent commuting but this effect is not significantly higher than the same returns for suburban men. A somewhat surprising negative effect of commuting time on the earnings of suburban women and men was also observed. We suggest further research on this problem involving the "perceived constraint' hypothesis to explain the commuting gap between men and women.     

The Easterlin paradox and the decline of social capital: An integrated explanation

During the most recent decades people in the US have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (Easterlin, R.A., 1974. Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence. In: David, P.A., Melvin, W.R. (Eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth. Academic Press, New York, pp. 89–125) originally observed, and deterioration in their social and family ties, as Putnam (Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling Alone. Simon&Schuster, New York) has claimed. The paper proposes an integrated explanation of these two stylised facts by extending the analysis of the relative income explanation of the Easterlin paradox to social relationships as enjoyable ends of choice. Drawing on the evidence-based results of psychology, the paper constructs a model whose premises are (i) that individuals produce social relationships by means of relational ability, (ii) that this ability is primarily shaped during infancy, and (iii) that commercial pressure on children to consume in competition with others may displace the enjoyment of social relationships. The model is thus also able to explain the case of rich countries, like Sweden, that devote relatively more human and material resources than the US to children and adolescents, and that experience both increasing subjective well-being and improving social capital.     

Active Commuting Patterns at a Large,Midwestern College Campus

Abstract

Objective: To understand patterns and influences on active commuting (AC) behavior. Participants: Students and faculty/staff at a university campus. Methods: In April–May 2008, respondents answered an online survey about mode of travel to campus and influences on commuting decisions. Hierarchical regression analyses predicted variance in walking and biking using sets of demographic, psychological, and environmental variables. Results: Of 898 respondents, 55.7% were female, 457 were students (50.4%). Students reported more AC than faculty/staff. For students, the models explained 36.2% and 29.1% of the variance in walking and biking, respectively. Among faculty/staff, the models explained 45% and 25.8% of the variance in walking and biking. For all models, the psychological set explained the greatest amount of variance. Conclusions: With current economic and ecological concerns, AC should be considered a behavior to target for campus health promotion.     

Efficiency of consumer intertemporal choice under life cycle cost conditions

Many decisions made by consumers are intertemporal. Life cycle cost (LCC) conditions represent a specific type of intertemporal decisions, typically referring to items involving two cost components: present purchase price and future maintenance costs. This paper presents a conceptual framework for analyzing consumer LCC decision making. Within this framework the notion of choice efficiency is highlighted. The main contribution of the study is the direct estimation of consumers’ choice efficiency, as compared to previous studies that estimate only consumers’ implicit discount rates. Effects of situational and personal variables on efficiency of choice are estimated by means of a series of manipulated choice settings. The main empirical findings show situational effects of monetary size, type of object and time horizon. Additional findings show the effect of personal variables such as gender, marital status and education.     

Objective interpersonal comparisons of utility

 This paper examines the problem of distilling conflicting interpersonal comparisons into a single set of interpersonal comparisons. The mapping that achieves this has a richer co-domain than all social choice problems (and a richer domain than most social choice problems). The set of mappings satisfying a mild set of restrictions is very small. If interpersonal comparisons embody ratio-scale comparability then the mapping is Cobb–Douglas in form; if interpersonal comparisons embody no more than level and difference comparability then the mapping must be dictatorial and it is impossible to combine different interpersonal comparisons. Received: 16 February 1995/Accepted: 13 October 1995     

Values and Vegetarianism: An Exploratory Analysis1

The American diet has changed substantially over the last few decades. These changes provide a test for social theory and have substantial effects on the demand for various food products, thus impacting U.S. agriculture. In this paper a rapidly growing dietary choice—vegetarianism—is explored. Prevalence of various forms of vegetarianism is estimated in a representative sample of a suburban population and factors that influence choice of a vegetarian diet are examined. About 7 percent of the sample report they are vegetarians. The prevalence of vegetarianism is not influenced by age, gender, or education, but individuals holding traditional values are less likely to be vegetarian than others. There also is some evidence mat individuals holding altruistic values are more likely than others to be vegetarians.