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

Researchers developed the Travel Mood Scale (TMS) to address the limitations of traditional, post-hoc transportation surveys prone to recall bias. Traditional methods often rely on long, cumbersome surveys or paper-based diaries that are difficult to complete immediately upon finishing a trip. The TMS is a concise, semantic differential scale designed for seamless integration into smartphone applications, enabling researchers to capture instantaneous mood data.

The study recruited 738 college students to complete the TMS and the existing Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) while reflecting on their most recent trip. The researchers performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to assess the scale's structure, reliability, and validity. Additionally, they used OLS regression to analyze how variables like transportation mode, trip purpose, social interaction, and gender influenced reported mood, relaxation, safety, and sociability.

The TMS demonstrated strong internal reliability and convergent validity, showing high correlations with the established STS. The results confirmed that travel mood is significantly influenced by context: participants reported more positive moods and higher levels of relaxation during non-work or non-educational trips and when they socialized with others during their journey. Furthermore, the study identified a clear gender gap, with female participants reporting lower feelings of safety across all modes of transportation compared to male participants.

By providing a valid, concise tool for mobile data collection, this research offers a practical solution for capturing real-time user experiences. The ability to measure mood at the moment of transit—rather than retrospectively—allows transportation planners and researchers to better understand how trip purpose, social interactions, and specific transport modes affect well-being, ultimately aiding in the design of more user-friendly transportation systems.