Investigating aging Americans' transportation options in the era of crowdsourcing: Questionnaire design and survey implementation through Amazon Mechanical Turk

摘要

A rapidly aging population in the United States has brought significant challenges to transportation planners and service operators. One of the most important challenges is to figure out aging Americans' travel needs in a timely manner, in order to promptly provide them with better transportation access as they age. The present research investigates how and where to collect such information. In particular, it constructs a comprehensive survey questionnaire specifically targeting aging Americans' transportation options and implements the survey using an innovative crowdsourcing platform - Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). This study has dual aims. First, it shows the design of an all-inclusive survey that gathers meaningful insights on senior transportation options from different categories of respondents, including 1) older adults, 2) young, caregiving adults, and 3) young, non-caregiving adults. It is important to include all of these respondents, because they represent either current or future customers of senior transportation services. Second, the study demonstrates the resourceful survey implementation tool - MTurk, which provides a valuable platform to investigate timely issues such as aging Americans' travel needs. MTurk platform is able to capture all three categories of respondents; and survey respondents share a similar distribution pattern like those seen in generally accepted, representative surveys (e.g., Census and National Household Travel Survey).