Impact of time-space prism accessibility on time use behavior and its propagation through intra-household interaction

Accessibility influences a variety of behavioral facets in time use, resource allocation, and activity/task allocation of household members. In spite of the recognition of the importance of accessibility in behavioral modeling, appropriate measures that account for individual heterogeneity in the net accessibility are rarely used in time use and activity participation models. We fill this gap by first measuring time-space prism accessibility for each individual based on their spatio-temporal constraints. The time-space prism accessibility measures are included in a system of behavioral models and the relationship between accessibility and time use behavior is assessed in the context of intra-household interaction. Time-space prism accessibility measures account for the temporal constraints and spatial settings around important activity pegs for each individual, and therefore provide a unique opportunity to assess temporal and spatial dimensions of human behavior together. These approaches also solve the issues of endogenous relationships between time-space prism accessibility and time use that should be accounted for in regression-based analysis. In the analysis reported in this paper, Structural Equation Model (SEM) with latent variables is used to model the complex correlation between individual accessibility and time use with a proper representation of the endogeneity of time-space prism accessibility. The SEM is applied to ten different life cycle stages and the results are compared. As expected, the impact of parenthood on the association between the level of time-space prism accessibility and time use behavior is prominent.