Changes in mobility over the life course: the importance of biographical and accessibility-related key events

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Holz-Rau
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258756569

'Mobility biography' approaches have recently been developed in transport studies that investigate the stability and variability of mobility over an individual's life course. The term 'mobility' is used deliberately here to include realised travel behaviour and the availability of mobility tools, such as cars and public transport season tickets. Key events over the life course play a central role for mobility biographies. These may be assigned to three life domains (or 'partial biographies'): household and family biography, employment biography, and residential biography. What is more, mobility biographies are closely connected to changes in the spatial and transport system context in which a person lives.The project aims to extend existing research on mobility biographies with respect to seven, possibly eight, key empirical issues and, in doing so, also contribute to the further theoretical and methodological development of this approach:(1) The role of interactions between different life course-related key events,(2) the role of group-specific differences in the effects of key events on mobility,(3) effects of parental mobility on their children's mobility (socialisation),(4) interactions between two partners in a household in the effects of key events on mobility,(5) sequential structures between key events and changes in mobility, including lagged and lead effects,(6) the modelling of cohort effects and period effects,(7) the use of the nation-wide representative sample of the German Mobility Panel. Most research in the field to date is based on small regional samples with limited representativeness.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants