Telework From The Work-life Conflict Perspective And Its Impacts On Travel Behavior

As a flexible work system,telework has been developed for nearly 50 years.From the perspective of transportation,telework is also known as telecommuting,which refers to "using remote communication technology to partially or completely substitute commuting".As a measure of traffic demand management and a special way of commuting,telework can effectively reduce work travel,alleviate traffic congestion in peak hours,and reduce energy consumption and environmental pollution.Therefore,it has received long-term research attention from the field of transportation.Telework will have further development in the post epidemic era,therefore will play an increasingly important role in solving urban problems such as traffic congestion and environmental pollution.Understanding an individual’s telework behavior(option,choice,frequency)and its impact on travel behavior are crucial for urban and traffic management to make proper and effective policies.However,there are still many disputes on the two aspects.In terms of individual-level telework behavior,current research is primarily statistical analysis but lacks theoretical explanations,resulting in serious empirical inconsistence on the relationship between telework and the three most basic individual attributes(gender,marriage,and children).Moreover,little attention has been paid to the temporal dynamics of telework behavior.For the research of telework impact on transportation(especially commuting travel),the academic community has been debating between the "substitution effect hypothesis" and the "complementary effect hypothesis".The dispute is primarily caused by the reciprocal causal endogenous problem between telework and commuting travel,which hinders the causal inference.Moreover,the current research mainly focuses on the impact of telework on commuting travel,and less attention is paid to non-commuting work travel and non-work travel.In response to these current research issues,this dissertation proposes several improvements.First,this dissertation constructs the work-life conflict theory,which considers telework as a mean of trade-off between work-to-family conflict(WFC)and family-to-work conflict(FWC),based on the German Microcensus 2010 dataset,zero-inflated ordered probit(ZIOP)regression models were used to estimate the telework choice for individuals in different family-life stages and corroborate the proposed theory.Then,this dissertation proposes telework temporal dynamics measurement and investigates telework option dynamics and choice dynamics based on the MOP 2012-2015 dataset.Third,using telework dynamics and residential relocation information,this dissertation proposes different research designs and constructs panel analysis models to control the endogenous problem between telework and commuting travel.A similar research methodology has also been applied for different commuting travel modes and non-commuting work travel.Fourth,based on the Hausman test,F test,and LM test,this dissertation chooses the most suitable models from the pooled ordinary least squares regression model(POLS),fixed effect regression,and random effect regression to investigate the influence of telework on non-work travel.Fifth,based on the Chinese General Social Survey(CGSS)2015,this dissertation investigates the telework behavior in China using correlation analysis and multinomial logit regression.Based on those theoretical and empirical methods,the following conclusions are achieved:(1)Life stages associate with telework behavior in a complex way.Three patterns have been distinguished.Specifically,irrespective of gender and marital status,parents are less likely to telework compared to those without children(pattern 1).Regarding individuals without children,single individuals are more likely to telework than married ones,and males are more likely than females(pattern 2).In contrast,for individuals with children,the partnered parents are more likely to telework than single parents,and females are more likely than males(pattern 3).(2)Regarding the temporal dynamics of telework option and choice,for those who always have telework option,13.87% of them show telework choice transition.Changes in socio-demographic features(e.g.,decrease in household income),job-related characteristics(e.g.,employment status change,workplace relocation)and transport-related characteristics(e.g.,accessibility around home and parking situation around workplace,etc.)significantly influenced the temporal dynamics of telework option and choice.Especially,the telework option dynamic has a significantly huge influence(75.52%,91.29%)on the telework choice dynamic.(3)Regarding the impact of telework on commute travel,the estimated impact without considering household relocation and telework behavior dynamic,whether significant or not,can hardly be taken as evidence for the "telework—household relocation—increased commuting length—urban sprawl” hypothesis.The causal mechanism identified based on the results of cross-sectional studies needs to be taken more caution.At the same time,compared to active travel and public transit commuting,the private vehicle commuting duration is more significantly associated with individual telework behavior.(4)Regarding the impact of telework on non-work travel,telework has no significant impact on non-work travel behavior for both teleworkers and their non-employed household members.But it significantly and positively correlates with the average(one-way)shopping trip distance and weekly shopping duration/distance for other employees in the household.This shows that the impacts of telework on non-work travel for individuals and their household members are not as large as theoretically expected,but to a limited extent.(5)Telework in China is more popular than that in Germany.17.51% of the sample always or often work at home within normal working hours.Among them,63.64% of individuals have a low level of education,and 53.03% of individuals are employers or self-employed business owners.They are reflections of the educational attainment of the population born in the 1960s-1980 s and the system of individual industrial and commercial households in China.The dissertation also found some common features in terms of telework behavior between China and Western countries.For example,household size is negatively related to telework participation.Furthermore,work characteristics,individual’s perceptions and attitudes towards work/life are significantly correlated with their telework behavior.