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Understanding the Relationship Between Companionship and Subjective Wellbeing in Activities and Travel when We Control for Other Contextual Factors such as Disabilities - In this presentation the relationship between companionship and subjective wellbeing (SWB) is explored using data from the American Time Use Survey of 2021. SWB is defined in term of experienced happiness, meaningfulness, pain, stress, sadness, tiredness. The analysis distinguishes experienced SWB during trip episodes when SWB is influenced by possible expectations about SWB at the end of a trip from SWB at the location of specific activity types. The role of companionship in trip related SWB versus the role of companionship at the activity location is found to be different and depends on the type of activity. Moreover, experienced SWB in trips alone is fundamentally different than in trips with others. This is particularly pronounced for people with disabilities. The analysis here controls for a variety of other contextual and social demographic factors and the findings are cross checked with the state-of-the-art literature. The paper concludes with policy recommendations, limitations, next steps to complete the research presented here.
