Life-Oriented Behavioral Research for Urban Policy

This chapter first emphasizes the importance of understanding human behavior for urban policymaking and discusses the motivations of proposing the core approach in this book, i.e., the life-oriented approach. Second, it describes the life-oriented approach, which argues that interdependencies are essential to understand various life choices. Third, this chapter summarizes the contents of each chapter included in this book.

This chapter presents empirical evidence of behavioral interdependencies across more than 80 life choice variables, based on data collected from a cross-sectional survey, a panel survey, and a life history survey in Japan, respectively. Similar analyses are further conducted with respect to more than 20 indicators of life satisfaction and happiness, as a whole life and by life domain. Very complex patterns of cross-domain and within-domain interdependencies are revealed by using statistical modeling approaches. This is the first study in literature to clarify behavioral interdependencies across life choices from such a comprehensive way. Analyses also suggest a variety of research issues for promoting the life-oriented approach.

This chapter focuses on lifestyles and life choices. Although there is not a formally agreed definition of it, the ‘lifestyle’ concept—derived from sociology—might be useful in life choice studies. It highlights the importance of ‘soft’ factors next to the traditional ‘hard’ factors (e.g., demographic, socioeconomic and spatial characteristics) while explaining life choices. This chapter first provides a structured overview of the ‘lifestyle’ concept in terms of definitions and measurement methods. Two broad perspectives exists: (1) a mechanistic lifestyle approach considering a behavioral typology of activity and time use patterns, and (2) a sociographic lifestyle approach focusing on a behavioral orientations—values, attitudes and preferences—and a latent factor motivating behavior patterns. The second part of this chapter reviews how the ‘lifestyle’ concept has been used in life choice studies so far. It specifically focuses on applications in the research domains of demography and family studies, geography and urban studies, and transportation. Both perspectives are used interchangeably without little evaluation of the usefulness of various formal lifestyle classification systems. Moreover, most life choice studies consider ‘lifestyles’ as static and given, and not as something dynamic that might change over time. This calls for a more longitudinal perspective on the interaction between lifestyles and life choices. Other avenues for further research include the integration with a social network and a geographical perspective.

This chapter focuses on car dependence in people’s life. The authors first describe a new phenomenon about the decline in young people’s car ownership and usage by providing additional facts and insights based on literature review and a case study in Japan. Especially, the case study in Japan uses data from a longitudinal national household expenditure survey and confirmed that car ownership and usage decisions in Japan are more or less associated with decisions about other household expenditures. Second, recent research on shared mobility is reviewed from the perspective of smart use of cars. Third, existing studies on cars from the life-oriented consideration are described by looking at shopping behavior (both store-shopping and online shopping) and general purchasing behavior as well as electric vehicle ownership and usage. As for electric vehicles, the influence of lifestyle is explored. Fourth, car ownership and usage for an inclusive society are discussed, where low-income persons, children, and the elderly are focused on. Fifth, behavioral changes toward less dependence on car from a long-term perspective are illustrated. Finally, discussions on car dependence from the life-oriented perspective are given.

This chapter deals with not only household car ownership and usage, but also ownership and usage of in-home electric and electronic appliances from the perspective of energy consumption. Household energy consumption is an outcome of a series of life choices including end-use ownership, end-use efficiency, end-use usage, time use, expenditure allocation, residential location choice, employment choice, and household structure decisions. It is related to all life domains and also has externalities such as impacts on health. Life-oriented methodology that considers the potential interactions between household energy consumption and other life choices would be more appropriate to investigate this issue. To that end, this chapter sheds light on three fundamental questions related to household energy consumption: (1) How much is the minimum energy demand for households in the context of their life choices? (2) How do factors of attitude, belief and consciousness work on residential choice and household energy consumption? (3) How can household energy demand be actively managed by designing life choice-oriented interdisciplinary policies? In this chapter, the externality of household energy use on health is discussed as well.

The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) is revolutionizing people’s lives in many ways. Among their numerous impacts, ICT solutions allow for more flexibility in individuals’ schedules, and provide new alternatives for the organization of work, social and recreational activities. Several types of relationships are possible between the adoption of ICT and travel behavior, leading to the eventual complementarity with, substitution of, modification of, or neutrality with travel. Modern technologies play an important role in affecting individuals’ long- and medium-term decisions as well as numerous daily choices. The application of information and communication technologies is also behind the introduction of new shared mobility services that were barely imaginable only a few years ago. These services expand the set of travel options available to individuals. The effects of the availability and adoption of these technologies on individual behaviors are still largely unclear. They will likely cause long-lasting impacts on travel patterns, vehicle ownership, and life organization.

Health has been of growing interest for professionals in a variety of disciplines, including engineers and urban planners among many others. Urban and transport policies may be interlinked with health at many levels, directly or indirectly, because connections between life choices and health may be bidirectional. A healthy life means a balanced condition of not only physical health, but also mental and social health. However, existing studies have mainly focused on the physical health and ignored the mental and social aspects in people’s health-related quality of life (QOL). Therefore, this chapter makes a review of health behavior and health-related QOL with respect to health lifestyle habits, health promotion activities, active and non-active travel behavior (active travel refers to walking, bicycling and partially refers to use of transit systems), park usage, residential environment, and urban infrastructure. Lifestyle habits are reviewed by focusing on smoking, alcohol drinking, eating, sleeping, social contacts, and commuting, etc. Various future research issues are finally discussed.

Tourism as an extension of people’s daily life is becoming prevalent in today’s society. However, understanding tourists is still a demanding and changeable task, and the preference structures and decision patterns of different tourists are complex. Research on tourism behavior can help address these issues. In recent decades, research on tourism behavior has attracted considerable attention and has become a cornerstone of tourism market strategy and action. Tourism is not a transient behavior, but is repeated over time and is interrelated with daily life. To understand tourists’ lifestyle and decision-making processes, long-term observations of tourism behavior are needed. A life-oriented approach cannot ignore tourism behavior because it is an important part of life. This chapter analyzes recent research on tourism behavior, summarizes the pertinent concepts, characteristics, determinants, and shortcomings in existing studies on tourism behavior, and suggests directions for future research.

Across the whole world, gender inequality issues are serious, mainly because of traditional thinking about the role specification within a household. Within the context of urban policy, relevant studies are very limited. This chapter argues that women’s labor participation should be further promoted for not only achieving gender equality, but also realizing sustainable economic development. Based on an extensive literature review, a case study in Japan was conducted by considering women’s family responsibilities (especially, childcare), associated work–family conflict, time-related work–leisure conflict, and stress-related work–health conflict jointly. To examine women’s decisions on labor participation associated with other life choices, a recursive multiequation system is used. Applying such a modeling system have several advantages: (1) to identify the barriers to women’s labor participation in Japan after controlling for the effects of land use, transport, and life cycle stages; (2) to clarify the factors for women’s good quality of family life, leisure life, health life, and quality of life as a whole; and (3) to provide cross-sectoral policy implications for women’s labor participation and promotion of quality of life and work–life balance.

This chapter briefly overviews studies on mobility of the elderly with a particular focus on its conceptualization, measurement, and evaluation. The role of mobility in the everyday life of the elderly is first explored through putting mobility discourses into a broader context. After clarifying hierarchy of travel needs, interdependencies between mobility and other life domains, and the linkage between mobility and well-being are discussed. Then, policy aspects related to mobility of the elderly are examined, aiming to draw on the potential conflicts that exist among different perspectives including social welfare, economy, and urban planning. Finally, this chapter points out the needs for conducting further cross-cutting empirical studies, establishing a clearer linkage between conceptual framework and empirical framework, developing a simple and standardized method to collectively show the importance of social aspects of transport, and exploring the potential changes in the role or position of the elderly in future.

This chapter describes risky behaviors in daily life, especially focusing on young people. Driving while intoxicated, speeding, and illegal drug use are examples of risky behaviors, which often compromise health, quality of life, or life itself. People perform some risky behaviors consciously while they do others unconsciously. This chapter first depicts some typical theories of risky behaviors, including Heinrich’s domino model, problem behavior theory, social development model, life history theory, and lifetime utility theory. Next, it illustrates young people’s risky driving by reviewing risk homeostasis theory, applications of theory of planned behavior, influences of social networks and other persons, avoidance driving, mood during driving and driving purpose, driving and nightlife, and self-driving cars. Literature review suggests that there are some common factors (not only psychological factors, but also life choices and various habits formed in daily life) affecting different types of risky behaviors, suggesting that risky behaviors tend to covary and effects of one risky behavior may spill over to influence other risky behaviors. These imply that measures to prevent a risky behavior should jointly target multiple risky behaviors based on an integrated approach over a long period.

This chapter deals with how people adapt their lives to natural disasters, such as flood, cyclone, extreme weather events, earthquake, and sea level rise. With the changing global climate, the disasters would appear more frequently and seriously. However, it is still uncertain where the disasters will occur nearby personal daily activity areas, and how great the impacts on human life will be. Surprisingly, literature review suggests that relevant studies are very limited, especially in the context of developing countries. Targeting Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate and the sixth most vulnerable to floods, this chapter describes three case studies on people’s adaptation behaviors under the impacts of different flooding and cyclone scenarios in future by focusing on intercity travel behavior, job and residential location choice behavior, and tourism behavior respectively. Various findings are derived, which are useful to help identify the barriers to the adoption of adaptation measures, the roles of different stakeholders in implementing adaptation measures, and the directions of adaptation measures in the future.

This chapter investigates mobility biographies and mobility socialization, which are especially useful to capture long-term life choices. In the past decade, a research approach has been developed to better understand daily mobility by framing it in the context of individual life courses, their path dependencies and their social, economic and space-time links. This chapter briefly reviewed this approach and its origins. The concept of mobility biographies is introduced first, including a discussion of the role of routines (habits), life domains linked to mobility, and key events and transitions in the life course. A further step puts individual mobility biographies in a wider social context by referring to the concepts of socialization and linked lives. The importance of historical context for studying mobility biographies is briefly sketched. The chapter concludes with an outlook on future research.

This chapter focuses on interdependent decisions on car ownership mobility, residential choice mobility, household structure mobility, and employment/education mobility over the life course. This study represents the above interdependencies based on a multilinear utility model and make an empirical study based on data from a web-based life history survey. Each of the four mobility domains is simply described as a set of episodes. Dependent variables in the model are the duration of each episode between two consecutive changes in each mobility domain. By using the multilinear utility functions, interepisode interactions within each mobility domain and interdomain interactions are simultaneously incorporated. The survey was conducted in 2010 and 1000 households provided valid data, and may well be the first life history survey with such a large sample size and comprehensive coverage in the transportation literature. Estimation results show a competitive relationship between the duration of episodes in the same domain, while a synergistic relationship between the duration of episodes in different domains exists. Furthermore, the biographical interactions in the life course are found to be substantial, contributing almost 95 % to total household utility, implying that mobility decisions are likely to be intertwined over the life course.

This chapter investigates household time use behavior by especially focusing on timing decisions on interdependent daily activities. Timing decisions on various life choices have been unsatisfactorily presented in literature. At best, such timing decisions have been presented based on survival analysis, which has various attractive statistical features, however, ignores decision-making mechanisms. This chapter argues that the utility of activity participation and trip-making behavior changes over time, and timing decisions within a given period of time interact across activities/trips and across household members. This study derives the optimal timing functions for both nonshared and shared activities/trips by different household members, where interdependencies among activities/trips over time and household’s coupling constraints are endogenously represented. The applicability of the developed model is empirically examined. Behavioral implications of analysis results are finally discussed.

This chapter explains and summarizes models of behavioral change and adaptation, which have received less application in the life choice analysis associated with urban policy. Related to various life choices, life trajectory events are major decisions with a relatively long-lasting impact, such as demographic events, job change and purchase of major resources such as a house and a car. These life trajectory events may co-vary over time and lead to dynamic changes in activity-travel repertoires. Such decision problems have hitherto been predominantly modeled in urban and transportation science using classic discrete choice models. However, because such decisions differ from daily choices, other modeling approaches may be more beneficial. The authors present discrete choice models with lifetime utility and social dynamics, attitudinal models, technology acceptance model, norm activation model, and value belief norm theory for modeling lifecycle decisions and/or lifecycle driven behavioral change.

This chapter first explores migration-related urban issues and then illustrates migration dynamics. It further points out the limitations of existing migration theories. To overcome the shortcomings of existing theories, this chapter presents a new analysis framework for migration, where multiple life choices, including migration, are simultaneously incorporated by expanding the theory of planned behavior. To empirically confirm the applicability of the new framework, a web-based questionnaire survey about migration associated with employment, dwellings and child rearing was implemented in Japan in 2015. This is the first study to reveal such interrelated behavioral changes in multiple life domains from the perspective of decision-making process. Such a theoretical reformulation could provide more scientific insights into cross-sectoral policies of migration than existing theories.

This book has attempted to provide a general picture about the life-oriented approach by focusing on major life choices. In reality, there are so many types of life choices and it is therefore impossible to cover all of them in a single book. Here, first, this chapter makes brief discussions on research issues related to several life choices excluded from the previous chapters. Second, relevance of the life-oriented approach to cross-sectoral planning and policy as well as general public services is described. Third, future research from the perspective of making use of Big Data is illustrated. Fourth, it is discussed how to put the life-oriented approach into practice. Finally, this chapter describes future perspectives of the life-oriented approach in general, as a truly scientific system.