Dr Claire Papaix is Senior Lecturer of Transport & Business Logistics at the Business Faculty of the University of Greenwich. Her research interests focus on the links between urban mobility and wellbeing. She notably worked on the valuation of boat commuting in London vs. Stockholm, and supervised undergrads, postgrads and PhD students dissertations on the triangulation of research methods to evaluate such links (e.g. "subjective" wellbeing survey data, biomarker "objective" wellbeing data and commuting satisfaction). More specifically, she is interested in wellbeing evaluation techniques from a theoretical point of view, and in gamified/wellbeing-centred solutions for an effective change in mobility behaviours from a policy/managerial perspective.
Learning from practice, running an online fitness business in parallel, she would like to bridge the gap between research and practice, through social prescribing, on how to empower individuals and communities to adopt healthier and happier lifestyles, whether it translate in mobility behaviours or wider habits.

She will take a research sabbatical from the 1st of September 2020 to acquiring new knowledge on geo-spatial analysis and extend the scope of her expertise in wellbeing appraisal.

Awards

• Prize special ‘entreprises’ 2015 Paris-Est University 

Research in progress:

Does the way we feel affect how we travel? Measuring the impact of life satisfaction, personality traits and physical characteristics on London commuters’ travel satisfaction.

Abstract

Improving citizen wellbeing is a major public policy goal. Measuring the wellbeing effects of policies and projects is reaching political importance on the agenda for future cities. Through measuring London commuters’ wellbeing outcomes in different transport modes, this research aims to evaluate and compare individuals’ commuting satisfaction and its interactions with life satisfaction and personality traits. The promotion of inland waterways transport (IWT) is advocated as a possible solution, among the use of public transport and active travel. A survey is designed, comprising socio-demographics, commuting and life satisfaction, travel habits and personality traits, and administered to over 1,000 London commuters in June 2019. Besides subjective measures, objective physiological responses to the experience of commuting, including resting heart rate (RHR) as captured by biometric sensors and emotions from facial images, are measured from subsamples of surveyed participants. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to validate variables from the survey data. EFA results reveal three indexes revealing commuters’ hierarchy of (commuting) needs. Analysing the indexes using independent t-tests, we find that commuting satisfaction variables rank higher in the preferences of boat commuters than in those of non-boat users. As concluded from the measurable indicator scoring technique (MIST), commuters in each mode reveal differentiated commuting satisfaction, life satisfaction and personality traits. By performing an ordinal logistic regression (OLR), we also find a causality between life satisfaction, personality traits on the one hand and commuting satisfaction on the other. The t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE), as one of the most widely used dimensionality reduction methods for data visualization, suggests that lower resting heart rate and “happier” facial image positively correlate with higher commuting satisfaction.