University of California Transportation Center

This dissertation employs structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to explore the tradeoffs people make when engaging in teleshopping activities from home. Using the Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) 2000 this dissertation performs an activities analysis to investigate these relationships. Time use variables are included that predict the amount of time each individual spends during the day on work, maintenance, discretionary, and shopping activities, both in and outside of the home. These activities are used to predict the amount of shopping travel each person undertook. Results suggest that people substitute home teleshopping time for shopping travel time, and teleshoppers take fewer shopping trips and travel shorter total distances for shopping purposes. However, these effects are mainly “indirect” and appear to be mediated through two time-use variables – In-Home Maintenance and In-Home Discretionary activities. Home teleshoppers tended to spend more time on In-Home Maintenance and less on In-Home Discretionary activities than non-home teleshoppers.

Variables constructed to represent the degree to which people are “time-starved” from the demands of their work and maintenance activities revealed that female heads of households tend to home teleshop more, make more shopping trips and shopping trip chains, shop out-of-home more, and shop travel for longer periods than the rest of the survey population. A variable constructed to measure each survey participant household’s accessibility to shopping opportunities suggests that people who live in high retail accessibility areas tend to home teleshop slightly (but statistically significantly) more, take more shop trips, make more shop trip chains, and travel shorter total distances for shopping purposes than those who live in lower accessibility neighborhoods.

These results suggest that home teleshopping is primarily used as a tool to restructure a person’s daily activities participation, which in turn, restructures a person’s shop travel behavior. The degree to which someone is time-starved – particularly, female head of households – appears to play a role in determining the propensity to home teleshop as does a person’s relative accessibility to retail opportunities. While confirmatory analysis is necessary, these results suggest that activity-based travel demand models would benefit from the inclusion of home teleshopping, time-starved, and retail accessibility variables.