Travel and Subjective Well-Being: A Focus on Findings, Methods and Future Research Needs

Abstract

Subjectively experienced well-being has recently attracted increased attention in transport and mobility studies. However, these studies are still in their infancy and many of the multifarious links between travel behaviour and well-being are still under-examined; most studies only focus on one aspect of this link (i.e. travel satisfaction). In this paper, we give an overview of studies concerning travel and well-being, focusing on results, methods and gaps in present research. We suggest that travel behaviour affects well-being through experiences during (destination-oriented) travel, activity participation enabled by travel, activities during (destination-oriented) travel, trips where travel is the activity and through potential travel (or motility). The majority of empirical studies to date have been based on hedonic views of well-being, where pleasure and satisfaction are seen as the ultimate goal in life. They have paid little attention to eudaimonic views of well-being, which emphasise the realisation of one's true potential, although this form of well-being can also be influenced by travel behaviour. We also argue that longer-term decisions, such as residential location choices, can affect well-being through travel. Travel options differ between different kinds of neighbourhoods, which can result in different levels of (feelings of) freedom and consequently different levels of subjective well-being. Since studies at present only show a subset of the travel behaviour–well-being interactions, we conclude the paper with an agenda for future research.

Keywords:

• travel behaviour
• well-being
• travel satisfaction
• activities
• potential travel
• residential location choice

Notes

We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for raising these points.

In this paper, we prefer to distinguish more strictly than in previous transport research between travel satisfaction as (primarily) a cognitive evaluation of people's trips and travel behaviour and informed by reflective reasoning, and the positive/negative feelings associated with travel behaviour as manifestations of what people experience with and through their corporeal body and as (primarily) non-reflective in nature. The primary reason for this is that this distinction is very common in the wider SWB research community. This is not to deny that questions about satisfaction may capture some degree of affective experience as the distinction between reflection and affectivity cannot be taken as absolute (McCormack & Schwanen, 2011). It does, however, reflect our view that using the word 'satisfaction' in questions tends to prime survey participants to the cognitive realm and that using such words as 'feeling' or 'happy' is likely to trigger more affective reactions from respondents.

Activities during travel which are often associated with activities that people do at stationary locations will be discussed extensively in Section 3.3.