A novel approach to study the role of social networks in planning joint leisure activities

Incorporating social activities in activity-based models is inherently complex due to their diverse nature and the intricacies involved in social coordination. Traditional stated preference surveys also face challenges in capturing the nuanced negotiation processes among group members while planning the location and timing of these activities. To address these challenges, we design a novel street-intercept survey with a series of stated choice experiments to examine how the individual’s preferences for social activity location are affected by knowing the friend’s preferences and mobility inconveniences. We show the application of the approach to investigate the social dining preferences of a pair of friends in Singapore. Our findings indicate that social network attributes (such as the duration of social relationships) and sociodemographic characteristics (like the gender of friends) substantially influence the weight given to a friend’s preferences and convenience when selecting a location for joint dining activities. The method is adaptable to modeling other social activities and various activity dimensions (e.g., start time and duration).