The Impact of Active Transport on affective Mental Health and Future Mode Choice: Innovating a Within-Subject Encouragement Design to improve the Causal Understanding of Person-Place Interactions in Urban Residents Everyday Life

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Stefan Fina; Professorin Dr. Martina Kanning
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570368939

This follow-up proposal continues to investigate the interactions between people and places, combining spatial and social sciences to improve our knowledge of how to create health-promoting urban environments. It focuses on the mental health effects of active transport (e.g. walking/cycling) and extends our previous project by analyzing the causality of health effects. We will innovate new data collection methods and develop routines to investigate environmental features in real time. Empirical evidence emphasizes active transport as a key solution for improving mental health. However, inconsistent findings have shown that we have limited understanding of whether and under what circumstances active transport is associated with mental health. We need to know more about person-place interactions, where individuals' momentary reactions are exposed to environmental conditions and features, and how these reactions impact on future active transport. Therefore, this project first develops a within-person encouragement design to investigate causal effects of active transport. This design combines an experimental approach with ambulatory assessment allowing to assess participants' momentary reactions and environmental conditions in real life and in real time. We manipulate active transport by encouraging participants to engage in physically active or inactive transport the following day. Between- and within-subject effects will be analyzed using two-level structural equation modelling. Secondly, we will identify and implement new data collection methods to assess environmental characteristics and conditions (e.g. greenness, noise) in real time when an effect is hypothesized. Analysis routines will be developed to extract relevant information from this large data collection. By this, we will be able to estimate the time- and space-varying effects between the environment, the individual's transport behavior and the instantaneous experience of affective reactions or stress. Third, we estimate the mechanism by which these experiences determine future transport behavior. For this, we investigate a theoretically based relationship between positive and negative affective reactions and subsequent affectively charged as well as reflective motivational states. Mediation analysis will be used to analyze this interrelation and how it predicts subsequent active or inactive transport behavior (3 and 6 months later). In summary, by (1) developing an innovative experimental approach in the field and (2) generating analysis routines to handle data on environmental features and conditions and by (3) investigating the mechanism by which affect processing are associated with future transport mode choice, this follow-up proposal provides methodological advancement and scientific insights to adequately analyze time- and space-varying effects and to improve our understanding of how to create health-promoting urban environments.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Markus Reichert