A multilevel investigation of differential individual mobility of working couples with children: a case study of Hong Kong

Abstract

The objective of this article is to examine individual mobility of working couples (n = 3172) with children in Hong Kong from a multilevel perspective. Individual mobility is measured in terms of activity space, as captured by the size of Standard Deviational Ellipses, on a survey date. Multilevel models are used to disentangle effects at the (i) individual, (ii) household and (iii) neighbourhood levels. The fundamental belief is that each individual is under the simultaneous influence of his/her surrounding environment, the family and personal characteristics. Results of the multilevel analysis suggest that most of the variance in individual mobility of working couples with children in Hong Kong was at the individual level (66.8%). The spatial extent of the activity space had less variance at the household level (20.4%) and the neighbourhood level (12.8%). In particular, gender plays an important role in affecting individual mobility. Women with children, particularly those with lower socio-economic status and living in suburban areas, faced more constraints than their male counterparts in accessing opportunities.

Keywords:

• activity space
• gender
• women
• mobility
• multilevel analysis

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Research Grant Council (HKU 748408H). An earlier version of this article has been shortlisted for the Hong Kong Society for Transportation Studies (HKSTS) Outstanding Student Paper Award, and presented at the 15th HKSTS International Conference. The authors are grateful for the valuable comments received.

Notes

Note

Based on the recommendation of a reviewer, we conducted a similar analysis with average trip length (a distance measure). The model results are broadly similar but the coefficients of most variables decreased. The analysis suggests that AS_SIZE is consistent with simpler distance measures and the measure of SDE in this study is a robust measure of activity space. With the advantages of activity space measures over simple distance or time measures (see Section 1.1), the detailed results of average trip length are not presented here.