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Subjective well-being and travel: retrospect and prospect

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Abstract

Although the improvement of well-being is often an implicitly-assumed goal of many, if not most, public policies, the study of subjective well-being (SWB) and travel has so far been confined to a relatively small segment of the travel behavior community. Accordingly, one main purpose of this paper is to introduce a larger share of the community to some fundamental SWB-related concepts and their application in transportation research, with the goal of attracting others to this rewarding area of study. At the same time, however, I also hope to offer some useful reflections to those already working in this field. After discussing some basic issues of terminology and measurement of SWB, I present from the literature four conceptual models relating travel and subjective well-being. Following one of those models, I review five ways in which travel can influence well-being. I conclude by examining some challenges associated with assessing the impacts of travel on well-being, as well as challenges associated with applying what we learn to policy.

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Source: Adapted from De Vos et al. (2013)

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Notes

  1. Gärling and Gamble (2018) indicate that the term “subjective well-being” tends to be used by psychologists and “happiness” by economists. They and others also equate “life satisfaction” with the cognitive component of hedonic well-being, discussed below.

  2. For an extensive and valuable discussion of the measurement of SWB, see OECD (2013).

  3. More recently, De Vos et al. (2017) have conceptualized domain satisfaction as an intermediate-term construct mediating the effect of short-term trip- or activity-level measures of satisfaction on long-term well-being.

  4. A similar observation applies to the finding that, among travel episodes, car passengers report higher levels of pain than do users of other modes (Mokhtarian and Pendyala 2018): rather than concluding that being a passenger generates pain, it is more likely that, given that a trip is taking place, the car passenger mode is more conducive to transporting those in pain than are the car driver, transit, and active transportation modes.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a keynote talk delivered at the 14th triennial conference of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research, Windsor, UK, July 2015. As a relative newcomer to the study of SWB per se, I am grateful for the insightful suggestions offered by veteran scholars Tommy Gärling and Margareta Friman. Comments by Jonas De Vos and Atiyya Shaw were also very helpful in improving an earlier draft.

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  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Patricia L. Mokhtarian

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Mokhtarian, P.L. Subjective well-being and travel: retrospect and prospect. Transportation 46, 493–513 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-018-9935-y

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