Back to Overview of Sessions

Session Details

Apps on smartphones or other wearable devices enable us to follow people over time, and track what they do, where they go, at what time. The time-location data that result from such devices are now starting to replace survey data (e.g. for a travel diaries), or provide a rich context to existing survey data (e.g. in time use research).
More broadly, they allow us to understand human behavior in a better way: we can use techniques from GIS and spatial registers to enrich time-location data. A specific location can for example be at a train station, a particular shop or place for leisure. We can ask respondents about experiences of having been at a particular location. As another example, we can combine attitudinal survey data with behavioral location data to for example understand transportation choice.

Combing geodata with survey-data, both during data collection and in the analysis, offers lots of potential for future social science research. There are however still lots of practical and methodological problems in using and combining survey and location data. This session focuses on emerging methodologies in dealing handling location data collected through wearables and survey data. We invite proposals for papers focused on, but not limited to:

- Building apps or hardware to measure time-location data for people
- Methods to effectively record location-data in these apps
- Using location-data to ask specific survey questions during data collections.
- Enriching location-data using registers or GIS
- Combining survey and location data during data analysis.
- Studying measurement error properties of location-data.
- Dealing with missing episodes of location data.