How satisfying is the Scale for Travel Satisfaction? Jonas De Vos a,⇑ , Tim Schwanen b , Veronique Van Acker a,c , Frank Witlox a a Geography Department, Ghent University, Belgium b Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, United Kingdom c Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands article info Article history: Received 25 February 2014 Received in revised form 9 January 2015 Accepted 12 January 2015 Available online 20 February 2015 Keywords: Travel satisfaction Well-being Transport mode Reliability Ghent Belgium abstract The Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) has recently been developed to measure people’s satisfaction with travel. It supposedly consists of two affective and one cognitive dimension. As there have only been a few tests of its reliability and structure to date, this paper reports new tests using data on leisure trips from Ghent (Belgium). Differences in the reliability and structure of the STS by transport mode – car, public transport, bicycling and walking – are also considered. Overall, the results suggest that the specification of a single underlying dimension for affect rather than two offers a superior fit to the Ghent data, both for all modes combined and for car use and cycling separately. For public transport and walking a three-dimensional structure is more appropriate although individuals items do not load on the two affective dimensions as expected. Differences between previous studies and ours are partly caused by differences in how two of the scale’s items – alert/ tired and confident/worried – are correlated with the other items. Future studies using the STS may want to adapt the structure of STS by omitting some items or replacing them with alternatives as this may reduce respondent burden and increase internal consistency of the STS. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Well-being and travel satisfaction have recently attracted increased attention in transport-related research (De Vos, Schwanen, Van Acker, & Witlox, 2013). Over the past years authors have therefore developed scales to measure how people perceive their travel. The scale that has been applied most frequently to date is the Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS). This is based on methods developed to measure subjective well-being (SWB) and was first used by Ettema et al. (2011). SWB is widely assumed to consist of two dimensions (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffen, 1985; Ettema, Gärling, Olsson, Friman, & Moerdijk, 2013; Ettema et al., 2011): affective well-being refers to an individual’s emotional state (i.e., intensity, frequency, and duration of positive and negative affect), and cognitive well-being pertains to an individual’s assessment of his/her life in general (i.e., a cognitive judgment of satisfaction with life as a whole). The STS is designed using similar dimensions as SWB and can therefore be seen as a domain-specific version of SWB. In the STS the items measuring affective well-being (i.e., emotions) during travel are based on the Swedish Core Affect Scale (SCAS) (Västfjäll, Friman, Gärling, & Kleiner, 2002; Västfjäll & Gärling, 2007) and the core affect model by Russell (1980, 2003). According to the core affect approach, emotions can be decomposed into two underlying dimensions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2015.01.007 1369-8478/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Geography Department, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 S8, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. Tel.: +32 9 264 45 55. E-mail addresses: jonas.devos@ugent.be (J. De Vos), tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk (T. Schwanen), V.vanAcker@uva.nl, veronique.vanacker@ugent.be (V. Van Acker), frank.witlox@ugent.be (F. Witlox). Transportation Research Part F 29 (2015) 121–130 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part F journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trf