Children’s Life Satisfaction and Travel Satisfaction: An International Study

Background Recent research on travel has theoretically and empirically explained how everyday travel contributes to people’s life satisfaction. Most of these studies have been conducted with adults and mainly focused on the commute to work, with little known about how travel might affect children’s life satisfaction. Children and young people also travel on a daily basis to destinations such as school, but their choices are often mediated by their parent(s) or guardians. As well, in many cases they are escorted (e.g. an adult takes them) so their sense of control over such choices is likely diminished. Children (under the legal driving age) cannot operate a motorized vehicle, so their choice set for independent travel is in most cases smaller than adults. We would argue that both public health policies and school policies should be informed by research showing what factors influence children’s life satisfaction. Despite transport being a fundamental part of most children’s lives, how it might affect life satisfaction is currently unknown. Methods The data for this research comes from Canada, Japan, and Sweden. The surveys were distributed at public elementary schools. In total, 529 participant responses (184 in Canada, 189 in Japan, 156 in Sweden) were kept for this research. Simultaneous equation modelling was used to account for the various interactions possible between socio-demographics, independent mobility, travel attributes, social interaction, travel satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Results The results find that satisfaction with travel is associated to life satisfaction and that the possibility of independent travel (i.e. being allowed to travel without an adult) is strongly associated to travel satisfaction (TS), and indirectly to life satisfaction (LS). All modes apart from cycling were negatively associated with travel satisfaction and indirectly with life satisfaction. A negative indirect relationship between females and travel satisfaction was found, though no direct relation was found. The only significant result from the multi-group analyses between the countries were stronger negative associations between public transport frequency with TS and LS for Swedish children than for Canadian and Japanese children. This demonstrates that our findings of the TS-LS relationship and the other results are equally strong across the three countries. Conclusions As a global measure of well-being, the implications suggest that improving satisfaction with travel through greater autonomy can improve life satisfaction for children.