Of the two sources of travel satisfaction: A multi-level confirmatory factor analysis

The Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) captures travel satisfaction by using nine Likert-type items: three of these items capture cognitive evaluations of a journey and six affective responses to a journey. In contrast to previous uses of the scale that relied on hindsight reports, typically with some significant delay, our research explored in-situ responses provided immediately after completing a designated intermodal route that includes bus, tram, train, and walking segments. Each participant completed the same route multiple times, providing STS responses after each journey. The unbalanced longitudinal data from 42 participants were analyzed using a multilevel confirmatory factor analysis. The proposed multilevel model of 387 journeys fitted the travel satisfaction data, after some modifications, quite well: χ²(27) = 30.81, p = .279, Robust RMSEA = .021. Our results indicate that travel satisfaction is controlled by two complementary sources, the features of a journey and the features of a traveler, reflecting both situational influences, such as delays or disturbing passengers, and an individual’s relative judgmental harshness or leniency (i.e., a person’s relative negativity or positivity) when assessing journeys.