JobMob

Presentation

JobMob is the first major quantitative European survey on job-related “high mobility”. The overall aim of the research is to quantify and analyse long-distance mobilities in Europe, to identify their causes and impacts with regard to  transportation supply, family life and professional life. It aims to understand mobility practices, not only through the specific social arrangements and resources required by mobile people (sex, age, training and salary levels, hierarchical position, etc.) but also from the point of view of mobility experiences.  

The originality of this study lies in the specific nature of the mobilities studied — those of people who travel regularly for business, long-distance commuters and individuals with multilocational living arrangements. High mobility for job-related reasons has often been a topic of investigation, but more often than not based on an economic approach that only marginally addresses interaction with the social structure.

An initial survey (JobMob 1), conducted between 2006 and 2010 in Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Poland and Switzerland of over 7,000 people, examined job-related mobilities and their impact on the careers, well-being and family lives of mobile people. A second wave, conducted in Germany, Spain, France and Switzerland from late 2010 to early 2014, allowed for a longitudinal analysis in the four countries, making JobMob the first survey to measure long-distance mobility and its effects in its various expressions over the long term.

In addition to funding its quantitative components, the Forum’s participation in this project was also an opportunity to add a qualitative aspect to the study. The hypothesis for this component was the existence of different ways of appropriating living spaces and transit areas according to time frame (daily, multi-day or weekly commuting) and individuals’ familiarity with the spaces frequented.  To do this, the methodology developed includes a participatory section based on the photo-elicitation method (Rose: 2003; Harper: 2002).  The originality of this method lies in the inclusion of photographs during the interviews, which prompts respondents to talk about things they might not have otherwise. The joint analysis of interviews and photographs provides a more detailed reading of how respondents experience their daily mobility.

JobMob’s scientific objectives are threefold:

• to analyse in greater depth the motility of those who practice long-distance, job-related mobilities. This analysis will, in particular, help us identify those factors relating to the rail transport supply that are likely to affect these long-distance mobility practices.
• to measure changes in  overnighting practices and their implications for career and family life over time.
• to enrich scientific knowledge of the connections between long-distance, job-related mobility and social mobility by means of transversal analyses.

The research, launched in 2011, is conducted by Yann Dubois, Vincent Kaufmann, Emmanuel Ravalet, Stéphanie Vincent-Geslin and Gil Viry of LaSUR-EPFL. The results of the study will be available early 2014.

The Mobile Lives Forum plans to publish a book that will include an infographic visualization of the results of the quantitative study and its qualitative component.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Motility

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