Doctoral thesis

The role of attitudes in determining individual behavior in transportation : From psychology to discrete choice modeling

    17.01.2018

110 p

Thèse de doctorat: Università della Svizzera italiana, 2018

English This dissertation focuses on the role of psychological factors, particularly attitudes, in determining individual behavior in transportation and proposes procedures and methods to improve the measurement of psychological variables to be used in choice modeling. The thesis is divided into three chapters containing a methodological section, showing the innovation of the econometrics steps, and an empirical work, based on datasets collected in the context of transportation. The first chapter describes the drawbacks of using common instruments for attitude measurement, such as Likert scale or semantic differentia scale, and proposes to analyze attitudinal data using the Evaluative Space Grid in order to distinguish individuals having indifferent and ambivalent attitudes, as well as positive and negative inclinations. The second chapter endeavors to integrate the Evaluative Space Grid in the framework of discrete choice modelling in order to avoid the aggregation of the individuals lying on the neutral part of the latent continuum of the attitude object of the study. In addition, it empirically tests the hypothesis that individuals revealing indifferent and ambivalent attitudes behave differently in the context of transport mode choice for commuting purposes. Finally, the last chapter proves that both long-term stable constructs which are “memory-based”, namely generalized attitudes, and short-term situational specific constructs which are built at the time a specific situation occurs, namely localized attitudes, contribute in shaping individual preferences.
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1318730
Statistics

Document views: 83 File downloads:
  • 2018ECO001.pdf: 52