Understanding participants' perceptions of smartphone travel surveys: keys for successful survey implementation

Smartphone-assisted travel surveys are becoming of central importance in collecting detailed, accurate data of people’s travel activities. As occurs with their conventional survey counterparts, the quality of the data collected through these surveys is adversely affected by participants’ non-response and the resulting biases. However, little is known about the factors affecting people’s perceptions of these surveys and their intentions to participate. Although the existing literature has investigated the associations between individuals’ socio-demographic attributes and their likelihood of survey participation, the impact of their subjective perceptions and attitudes on their survey participation intentions and behavior has been left underexplored. Hence, through developing a model of the participants’ perceptions of smartphone travel survey applications (survey apps) as an emerging technology, this study aims to reveal such impacts and how they affect their intentions to participate in the respective surveys. In this study, a survey is designed and used to collect data, which provides the research participants with a real experience of participating in a smartphone-assisted travel survey before they are asked about their personal perceptions and attitudes. Partial least squares (PLS) path modeling is applied to analyze the data, as it allows simultaneous estimation of the relationships between multiple latent constructs as well as the indicators of each construct, without imposing any statistical distribution assumptions. The results indicate the significant, positive impact of the perceived “ease of use” and “usefulness” of the smartphone application, as the technological medium of data collection, on the participants’ “satisfaction” and “intention” to participate in the corresponding survey. The study found that participants’ perceived “risk”, associated with privacy concerns, did not have any significant impact on their intention to participate.