Diary Survey Quality Assessment Using GPS Traces

Abstract

Surveying diaries to collect evidence about travel behavior is known to be susceptible to erroneous reporting. Many respondents do not exactly remember details about executed trips and activities. This paper describes a diary collection project aimed at tracking travel behavior in an electric vehicle pilot project. GPS traces corresponding to the collected diaries have been registered. Dedicated interactive software was used to align reported activity and trip timing with the GPS recordings. The difference between each original diary and the corresponding corrected version, has been quantified. The number of modifications as well as the distribution of their magnitudes have been analyzed. Time needed for correction has been recorded. Those results can serve to plan future data collection efforts and lead to specific recommendations to avoid error and data cleaning time. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).