Collecting multi-day data provides a richness of information that simply cannot be captured with a one-day survey providing insights into, for example, weekday and weekend travel, the impact of flexible working hours across the week on travel etc. Despite the intuitive appeal of multi-day surveys, there are few examples and little information for designers on sampling issues, particularly sample size requirements. With this in mind, the issues explored in this paper are: 1. the reasons given for not doing multi-day surveys, which primarily centre around respondent fatigue, 2. why these issues are fast becoming redundant through the use of new passive data recording technologies such as GPS, which have facilitated the possibility of collecting several days if not weeks of data with little additional respondent burden, 3. the sample size implications of extending the survey and whether in fact we reach a point of optimality in terms of the ideal survey duration, and 4. the potential cost savings of conducting multi-day surveys over 1-day surveys, even accounting for the use of new technologies. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E216058.
Abstract