Activity spaces: Measures of social exclusion?

The paper provides a first investigation of the suitability of different measures of activity space size to identify persons at risk of social exclusion. This would be a new departure for the measurement of social exclusion, which so far has relied either on aggregate measures of locations or cross-sectional data of individuals.

The size of a person's activity space can only be estimated with information reflecting a longer time horizon. In this paper the six-week travel diary survey (Mobidrive) is used, which was conducted in two German cities in 1999. About 95% of all local trips were coded for 300 respondents (about 45,000 trips).

The paper develops three possible measurement approaches of increasing complexity (confidence ellipse, kernel density estimates, shortest paths networks). The analysis revealed that the main driver of the size of the activity spaces is the overall number of unique locations visited by the respondents and to a lesser extent, their socio-demographic characteristics. In particular, the groups most often consider to be at risk of social exclusion (female, lower income, elderly) did not show significantly different activity spaces.