Changing mobility practices. Can meta-ethnography inform transferable and policy-relevant theory?
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Social practice theories have attracted attention for their potential insights into how to change transport systems towards "healthier" states. However, most evidence is from small-scale qualitative case studies. We explored whether a synthesis of qualitative evidence on mobility practices in one country, informed by meta-ethnography and a Bourdieusian approach to practice, could produce theory that is of sufficient abstraction to be transferable, yet also capable of informing intervention planning. The synthesis identified three third order constructs: mobility practices result from habitus plus capital in fields; specific configurations of local mobility practices are shaped, but not determined, by material infrastructures and social structures; and changes in practice happen across a number of scales and temporalities. This body of evidence as a whole was then interpreted as an integrative "storyline": Mobility systems are complex, in that outcomes from interventions are neither unilinear nor necessarily predictable from aggregations of individual practice changes. Infrastructure changes may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for change. Moving systems towards "healthier" states requires changing habitus such that "healthier" practices align with fields, and that interventions take sufficient account of the power relations that materially and symbolically constrain or enable attachments to and changes in mobility practices. Meta-ethnography is a useful approach for integrating qualitative evidence for informing policy.
Source: Social Science & Medicine
Authors: Cornelia Guell, David Ogilvie, Judith Green
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,360
Awards: 'On the buses': evaluating the impact of introducing free bus travel for young people on the public health, Environmental and policy approaches to changing physical activity behaviour, G3154241198, Pre-intervention qualitative component of proposed evaluation of public health impacts of Graduated Driver Licensing in Northern Ireland, G3505007512, G369834142, G3717045894, G4505278189, The M74 study: longitudinal follow-up of the health effects of a new urban motorway, G537120168, Health impacts of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, G5913717517, G6460535819, G7688267614
OpenAlex ID: W4386987091