Transportation Insecurity: Advancing the Knowledgebase
Creators: name: Dotson, Karina
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Transportation Insecurity
subject: Poverty and Inequality
subject: Health Outcomes
subject: Self Presentation
subject: Neighborhoods
subject: Measurement Development
subject: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: Social Sciences

description: Transportation insecurity is a condition in which one is unable to move from place to place in a safe or timely manner (Murphy et al. 2021). Within the field of sociology, transportation is rarely explicitly investigated. When we look to the qualitative literature, we see evidence of transportation’s importance woven throughout numerous ethnographic narratives of the lives of poor Americans—playing a role in securing housing, accessing healthcare, and connecting people to social networks. However, quantitative research on the topic is sparse. Our quantitative understanding of transportation insecurity is largely based on studies that employ measures as proxies for transportation insecurity. Drawing on these proxy measurements, scholars have shown that poverty makes it difficult for people to access reliable transportation (Blumenberg and Haas 2002; Ong and Houston 2002; Hamer 2011; Klein and Smart 2017) and that, in turn, not having reliable transportation makes it difficult to access places that might unlock opportunity, like work, job training, and social services. However, these proxy measurements, while correlated with transportation insecurity, do not fully capture the experiences of transportation insecurity. To address this, Murphy and colleagues have developed (Gould-Werth 2018) and validated (Murphy et al, 2021) a measurement of transportation insecurity—the Transportation Security Index (TSI)—a 16-item index which enables us to measure and operationalize the concept of transportation insecurity. Building on this work, with this dissertation, I endeavor to deepen our understanding of transportation insecurity, both methodologically and empirically. The first study is a multi-method paper that uses an inductive mixed-methods approach and a quantitative k-means clustering approach to identify five categories of transportation insecurity using the validated 16-item Transportation Security Index. The resulting five-category measure distinguishes among respondents with qualitatively different experiences of transportation insecurity. Analyzing data from 2018 that is representative of the U.S. adult population aged 25 and older, this paper demonstrates a non-parametric association between transportation insecurity and two different health measures—self rated health and depressive symptoms. The second study is a qualitative analysis of 184 interviews from three studies across urban, suburban, and rural areas. This study identifies and explores the emotional manifestations of transportation insecurity. This study finds that transportation insecurity is a deeply emotional experience—producing feelings of embarrassment, shame, guilt, and loss of independence. Further, I identify and explore two mechanisms by which transportation insecurity produces these emotions—by inhibiting a person’s control over their self-presentation and by undermining one’s sense of self. I discuss the importance of understanding these emotions for understanding the potential causes of transportation insecurity itself. The third study is a quantitative chapter, exploring how people’s perceptions of safety and worry of victimization by crime in their neighborhood is linked to their ability to get around. I explore this relationship through the lens of transportation insecurity, drawing on data from the Transportation Security Index Survey to consider how individuals’ neighborhood perceptions of safety and worry of victimization are related to their experience with transportation insecurity. Collectively, these studies work to deepen our understanding of transportation insecurity. Given that this condition is experienced by a quarter of Americans (Murphy et al. 2022), and associated with numerous outcomes of sociological importance, this work is timely and critical.