Investigating the Relationships Between Mobility Behaviours and Indicators of Subjective Well-Being

Müller, S. R., Peters, H., Matz, S. C., Wang, W., & Harari, G. M. (2020). Investigating the Relationships between Mobility Behaviours .... European Journal of Personality

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Abstract

People interact with their physical environments every day by visiting different places and moving between them. Such mobility behaviours likely influence and are influenced by people's subjective well-being. However, past research examining the links between mobility behaviours and well-being has been inconclusive. Here, we provide a comprehensive investigation of these relationships by examining individual differences in two types of mobility behaviours (movement patterns and places visited) and their relationship to six indicators of subjective well-being (depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress, affect, and energy) at two different temporal levels of analysis (two-week tendencies and daily level). Using data from a large smartphone-based longitudinal study (N = 1765), we show that (i) movement patterns assessed via GPS data (distance travelled, entropy, and irregularity) and (ii) places visited assessed via experience sampling reports (home, work, and social places) are associated with subjective well-being at the between and within person levels. Our findings suggest that distance travelled is related to anxiety, affect, and stress, irregularity is related to depression and loneliness, and spending time in social places is negatively associated with loneliness. We discuss the implications of our work and highlight directions for future research on the generalizability to other populations as well as the characteristics of places.

Main Points from Introduction and Literature Review

Introduction

• Mobility is found to be correlated with mental health, but past study focused on narrow set of indicators.

  • Table 1: Overview of prior literature on relationships between different kinds of well-being and mobility measures

• Current study contribution includes

  • Comprehensive set of GPS indicators

  • Include types of places visited

  • Include different subjective-wellbeing

  • Between person and within-person

Understanding and Accessing Everyday Mobility

• Highlighted existing literature on using mobility and place visited to understand peoeple's psychological experience

Movement Patterns and Subjective Well-being

• Movement patterns can include spatial range, frequency of movement, regularity over time, distribution across time and space.

• Prior research shows that individual movement patterns have regularity / routines.

• Subjective well-being is related to mobility, specifically

  • depression

  • Loneliness

  • Stress

  • Happiness

  • Affect and mood

  • Anxiety

  • Energy

• Specifically, depressive symptoms have been related to:

  • Lower circadian movement

  • Lower normalized entropy

  • Lower location variance

  • Longer stays at home

  • Total distance covered

  • Smaller number of location clusters visited

  • Less transition time

Places Visited and Subjective Well-Being

• literature discussing how people use places, such as instill a sense belonging.

• Affect and subjective well-being

Method

• N = 1765

• Measures

  • One-time survey

    • demographic

    • subjective well-being: depression, loneliness

  • GPS features: see table 3

    • Separated into Distance, Entropy, Irregularity, and Location.

    • Multivariate outlier detection using Mahalanobis distance

    • Log-transformed right-skewed data

    • Factor analysis discovered three factors using Kaiser-Guttman cut-off rule: distance, entropy and irregularity.

    • Subsequent analysis uses factor scores.

  • EMA (Four times a day at 12, 3, 6 and 9 pm)

    • Subjective well-being: anxiety, affect, stress, and energy

    • Type of places: report the type of place in which they spent the most in the past 1 hour and past 15 minute.

      • Categories include home, bar/party, cafe/restaurant, campus, fraternity or sorority house, friend's house, gym, library, religious facility, store/mall, work, vehicle, and other. Classified into stand-alone, social, and work-related places based on Oldenburg's category.

Result - Table 8

RQ1: At the between-person level, how do people's mobility behaviours over a two-week period relate to their subjective well-being?

• Pearson's correlation with Partial product-moment correlation coefficient controlling for gender

• High levels of irregularity -> less depressive symptoms and loneliness

• home -> more depressive symptom , loneliness, but less stress and energy

• social -> less loneliness, more anxiety and energy

• work -> less depressive symptoms, more stress

RQ2: At the within-person level, how do people's daily mobility behaviours relate to their daily subjective well-being?

• Mixed effect model with MLE estimation

• distance -> less anxiety and stress, higher affect

• entropy -> less stress

• Irregularity -> less energy

• the places people spend time during the day time predict daily subjective well-being

  • social -> low anxiety

  • work -> higher anxiety, higher stress

  • home -> low positive affect

Discussion

Effects of everyday movement patterns on subjective well-being

• contribution to growing literature on human mobility and subjective well-being

• contribution to broader literature on how physical movement is associated with subjective well-being

Effects of places visited on subjective well-being

• Importance of social places and home

Limitation

1. Convenient sampling

2. Focus on linear relationships

3. No information of the actual experience on the actual locations

4. No causal inference

5. No controlled estimation correction such as Bonferroni-Holm

6. Places is based on self-reported