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Published: 17 June 2021

Social milieus in mobility research

Since 2008, the Wissenschaftsforum Mobilität (Mobility Science Forum) at the University of Duisburg-Essen has offered a platform for the presentation and discussion of research work on the topic of mobility. This year's event on 17.06.2021 is themed "Transforming Mobility - What Next?" and addresses an interdisciplinary transformation of the mobility industry in the face of multi-layered challenges and societal changes.

For the Chair of Transport System Planning, Maria Kopp, Hilde Teichmann, Anna-Lena Haufer, Maximilian Wunsch and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Uwe Plank-Wiedenbeck successfully submitted the paper "Approach to Integrating Social Milieus into Mobility Research" to the Science Forum Mobility. In the conference track "New Trends in the Mobility Behavior of Urban Populations", they present the initial results of basic work on explaining mobility behavior. Against the background of an increasingly pluralizing society with diverse lifestyles, the paper addresses the linkage of mobility infrastructure, mobility sociology and mobility psychology as an explanatory model for the emergence of mobility behavior. On the basis of an established behavioral theory and by integrating the Sinus-Milieu model, psychological influencing factors are thus to be taken into account in mobility research in addition to infrastructural and social parameters. This results in the possibility of not only observing mobility behavior, but also explaining it and thus being able to actively change it in practice.