Social-activity travel: do the 'strong-tie relationships' of a person exist in the same community? The case of Switzerland

In the relatively new field of social-activity travel behavior research, it has often been stated that social relationships have become increasingly physically dispersed in various contemporary societies. If so, this dynamic has enormous consequences on both travel behavior and social support. More explicitly, people have to travel some distance in order to meet, they need to plan their social activities further ahead of time, and, sociologically speaking, they are at risk of weakening their relationships to friends, immediate family, relatives, etc due to spatial distance. In this paper a binominal logit model was used to examine the characteristics of Swiss citizens who had named nonlocal strong-tie relationships in a nationwide representative survey. The empirical findings show various characteristics that increase the likelihood of having strong-tie relationships outside one's community, such as one-person households, higher education, younger cohorts, long-distance commuting, and, interestingly, people who want to spend more time with friends. I elaborate a discussion of these findings as they concern recent debates in the field of social-activity travel behavior.