This paper presents the findings from a series of focus groups conducted with participants from a travel study which used personal Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. Travel surveys are usually lengthy, burdensome tasks for respondents. The advent of GPS technology makes it possible to employ a passive form of measurement, requiring little input from the respondent while accurately recording travel behaviour. However, very little is known at present about the behaviour of survey respondents as they employ the GPS devices. We conducted a focus group study during an on-going longitudinal GPS travel survey to understand the experiences of GPS users in our surveys, with a view to reducing the burden of the survey task, improving the quality of data collected, and capturing more complete records of travel. The discussions suggested a number of ways to improve the data collection procedure and indicated that more holistic and personal survey implementation could improve respondent retention. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E216058.
Samenvatting