About the Project
This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in a range of fields relating to environmental science and climate change.
The Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds invites applications from prospective postgraduate researchers who wish to commence study for a PhD in the academic year 2025/26 for the Institute for Transport Studies INFUZE Scholarship.
The award is open to full-time candidates (UK and international) who have been offered a place on a PhD degree at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds.
Full description
This PhD project will be part of the INFUZE research project, which aims to co-design solutions to allow people to own and use fewer cars without foregoing access to opportunities and leisure. Most of the existing research looks at how many cars people own, how they use them and how this changes over time focused on an individual perspective. Such studies link individual characteristics such as gender, age and events in a person’s life to their car ownership and use and used these factors to predict how it might change in the future. The interdependencies among the activity and travel decisions of the household members in the long, medium or short term (e.g. whether to work or not, own a car or not, who is in charge of a particular errand on a given day, etc.) are largely ignored. Even when the social context is considered (generally the household that individuals are a part of), the characteristics of such households, such as size or presence of children, are used, assuming that the family unit is viewed as a homogeneous decision maker.
The issue with this approach is that it does not take into account that car ownership and car use decisions (as well as other mobility-related outcomes) are often the product of interactions, negotiations and other decision-making processes within a household, and not taken by an individual in isolation or complete agreement. Households that are very similar in terms of characteristics (such as size) might have different potential to change their car ownership status if their in-household dynamics change, and understanding such processes could help researchers and practitioners better understand the potential of different policies and interventions.
This PhD project will require an inter-disciplinary approach. The candidate will be required to work on a suitable behavioural theory to accommodate the relevant processes. This could draw upon social psychology, social-network theory, game theory or social theories of practice. The theoretical framework will then be operationalised through econometric models to allow understanding and prediction of behaviour at a large scale and providing inputs for computational simulations, such as agent-based models. As such, this research is likely to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques to develop the socio-technical perspective and capture the dynamic processes of change within households.
In addition, a key part of the INFUZE project will consist of conducting trials where Leeds (UK) households will be offered different mobility solutions and monitored to observe how their travel changes. As part of this activity, there will be an opportunity to conduct in-depth research with trial participants to investigate the dynamic interaction between the contextual changes taking place as a result of the trial, and individual attitudinal and behavioural response, by focusing on the household as a unit and conduit of change. The INFUZE trials will allow a longitudinal approach to follow individual families as they interact (or not) with the selected interventions. It may be noted that depending on the background and interest of the student, there will be some flexibility in choosing how methodological versus applied the PhD topic will be.