The objective of this paper is to discuss the conceptual, methodological and computational issues that arise when using the Internet to collect travel behaviour data and to present results from a programme of work that is currently underway at Imperial College to develop a general purpose Internet based travel survey tool. The context of this work is the study of long travel behaviour in Europe. The work forms part of the TEST (Technologies for European Surveys of Travel Behaviour) and is funded by the European Commission. The paper comprises a number of sections. In the first section we briefly outline a taxonomy of travel survey methods and use this taxonomy to identify a number of different possible Internet-based survey approaches and discuss the potential methodological advantages and disadvantage of each approach. This section draws both on general survey principles and the results of preliminary qualitative research that was undertaken with potential users and developers of such tools. The second section discusses some of the key technical and computing issues that arise and goes on to outline the central elements of a comprehensive software specification for an Internet-aware data collection tool. The third section describes a pilot application that has been developed to implement some of the key features of this specification. The fourth section then presents the results of a series of small scale cognitive laboratory studies undertaken to investigate the effect of this new method of data collection upon respondents. The final section presents some overall conclusions from the work to date, and discusses the implications for future research.
Abstract