TimeUse+: A comprehensive app-based longitudinal study of travel, time use, and expenditures

Abstract

The ubiquity of smartphones has shaped how individuals shop for the goods they wish to consume and how they acquire said goods, whether it involves visiting a physical store or having an item delivered to one’s doorstep. Smartphones have also enabled a “sharing economy” of mobility tools such as car and bicycle sharing that has expanded the array of options available to travel to chosen destinations. Because consumption and travel research is rarely conducted in tandem, we do not have a clear picture of how individuals choose to use different forms of transport to effectively make use of their time, nor how much money is generally spent during everyday activities. Gaps also exist in the literature concerning secondary activities undertaken during travel or at home, what kind of activities (or portions thereof) participants perceive as committed (i.e. necessary), and how several contextual factors affect these behaviors. This paper will present the planned study design developed to identify and analyze the exact mechanisms that drive mentioned behaviors. We will use a hybrid survey method with passive app-based tracking and a conventional survey tools to capture time use, travel, and expenditure data along with sociodemographic, attitudinal, and psychological metrics for a representative sample in German-speaking Switzerland over an entire month.