Assessing the representativeness of a smartphone-based household travel survey in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Name
11116_2017_9851_ReferencePDF.pdf
Size
1.02 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
29d3846eefa5b1e27d5719e6d5a44517
Author(s)
Zegras, P. C
Li, Menghan
Kilic, Talip
Lozano-Gracia, Nancy
Ghorpade, Ajinkya
Tiberti, Marco
Aguilera, Ana I
Zhao, Fang
Date Issued
January 12, 2018
Publisher
Springer US
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Abstract
The household travel survey (HTS) finds itself in the midst of rapid technological change. Traditional methods are increasingly being sidelined by digital devices and computational power—for tracking movements, automatically detecting modes and activities, facilitating data collection, etc.. Smartphones have recently emerged as the latest technological enhancement. FMS is a smartphone-based prompted-recall HTS platform, consisting of an app for sensor data collection, a backend for data processing and inference, and a user interface for verification of inferences (e.g., modes, activities, times, etc.). FMS, has been deployed in several cities of the global north, including Singapore. This paper assesses the first use of FMS in a city of the global south, Dar es Salaam. FMS in Dar was implemented over a 1-month period, among 581 adults chosen from 300 randomly selected households. Individuals were provided phones with data plans and the FMS app preloaded. Verification of the collected data occurred every 3 days, via a phone interview. The experiment reveals various social and technical challenges. Models of individual likelihood to participate suggest little bias. Several socioeconomic and demographic characteristics apparently do influence, however, the number of days fully verified per individual. Similar apparent biases emerge when predicting the likelihood of a given day being verified. Some risk of non-random, non-response is, thus, evident.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Singapore-MIT Alliance in Research and Technology (SMART)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-017-9851-6
