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Children’s travel to school: satisfaction, current mood, and cognitive performance

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Abstract

We investigate whether travel mode, travel time, and activities during travel influence children’s satisfaction with their travel to school, their current mood, and their cognitive performance after arriving at school. A sample of 344 children (165 girls) between the ages of 10 and 15 years were recruited at five public schools in Värmland County, Sweden. Directly after arriving at school, the children rated how they felt on two scales ranging from very sad to very happy and from very tired to very alert, filled out the Satisfaction with Travel Scale adapted for children (STS-C), reported details about their journeys, and took a word-fluency test. The results for STS-C showed that traveling by school bus and walking or cycling was experienced as having a higher quality than traveling by car. Children who engaged in conversation during their journeys reported a higher quality and more positive feelings than children who were engaged in solitary activities during their journeys. A shorter journey was experienced as having a higher quality and resulting in more positive feelings. Children traveling for longer durations performed better in the word-fluency test if using their smartphones or doing a combination of activities during their journeys.

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Notes

  1. For further information about word fluency tests, see Cohen and Stanczak (2000) and Ruff et al. (1997).

  2. The effects of sex and grade are reported only once for each dependent variable since the results were close to identical in all the analyses.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for this research was obtained through Grant (#2014-05335) from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Jessica Westman, Lars E. Olsson & Margareta Friman

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Tommy Gärling

Authors
  1. Jessica Westman
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  2. Lars E. Olsson
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  3. Tommy Gärling
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  4. Margareta Friman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jessica Westman.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6 and 7.

Table 5 Satisfaction with travel
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Table 6 Current mood
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Table 7 Cognitive performance
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Westman, J., Olsson, L.E., Gärling, T. et al. Children’s travel to school: satisfaction, current mood, and cognitive performance. Transportation 44, 1365–1382 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9705-7

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