Travel mood scale: Development and validation of a survey to measure mood during transportation

Research on the relationship between transportation and mood has relied primarily on paper diaries that ask participants about their general satisfaction and mood during transport over a given period of time (e.g., the past week). This approach is vulnerable to recall bias. Some researchers have used surveys for participants to complete immediately after a trip in order to reduce recall bias, but this approach requires participants to carry a paper survey while travelling. Advances in phone technology enables researchers to measure mood immediately after a trip, thereby reducing recall bias and participant inconvenience. We build on prior research by developing a mood scale for use in transportation studies that utilize smartphone applications. This article introduces the development of the Travel Mood Scale (TMS), which was administered along with the Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) to 738 college students. When rating their mood, participants were asked to consider their most recent trip. The TMS was shown to have adequate internal reliability and correlated highly with the STS, demonstrating convergent validity. Ordinary least squares regression models showed that transportation mode, trip purpose, activities completed during the trip, and participant gender were significantly related to mood for both the TMS and STS, thereby supporting construct validity of the TMS. Specifically, mood was more positive when participants used active travel, went on nonwork/noneducational trips, and talked to other people during the trip. Compared with males in the sample, females reported feeling less safe when traveling. The concise nature of the TMS provides easy integration with smartphone apps, thereby providing a promising tool for assessing mood in transportation research.