Space-Time Behavior Research and Application in China - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 23

While location-based-service-facilitated data collection became popular for
space-time behavior research in the Western geography after 2000, Chinese urban
geographers have started catching up only in the last 5 years. GPS and GMS
phone tracking technology have been integrated into activity-diary surveys to collect
more accurate and real-time activity-travel information. In a pilot study conducted
in two suburban neighborhoods in Beijing in 2010, 100 volunteers are recruited
to participate in, each of whom is asked to carry a mobile tracking facility with
built-in GPS and GMS phone chips over a week and complete an activity-diary
survey through an online survey platform. Different from a traditional diary survey,
the online survey platform allows respondents to interactively see the trajectory
(i.e., space-time path) of their activities on a city map once respondents filled
out the activity-diary information (Chai et al. 2013 )(SeeFig. 3.1 ). Respondents
also can edit their activity information in case of recall error or system resolution
problem. Though this pilot survey has a small sample size, it nevertheless is
the first successful experiment conducted by Chinese geographers that integrates
traditional diary survey method and the mobile tracking technology in space-time
data collection. Furthermore, this pilot survey demonstrates the advantage of such
integrated approach in the collection of long-term, high-resolution individual space-
time data and the potential of scaling up this experiment into a full-scale survey with
a larger sample size.
Nevertheless, scholars also recognize that most surveys have only a small
sample size (often around several hundred households, or around 1,000 individuals)
and that information collected is challenged with possible recall errors. Luckily,

Fig. 3.1 The online survey platform in Beijing in 2010