Citation

Loyola M, Nelson JD, Clifton G, Levinson D. Transp. Res. Interdiscip. Persp. 2023; 17: e100754.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.trip.2023.100754

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Social science disciplines are increasingly using narratives to develop theory and uncover experiences that give an insightful understanding to people's beliefs and behaviours. This paper offers an analysis of the academic literature to show how narratives have been used in transport research between 1990 and 2021 and to discuss how narratives are useful for interpretation of real-world policy contexts. We perform a systematic literature review using 106 publications that met the identification and eligibility criteria from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. We analyse frequency and cluster the publications according to their focus and function. For the focus, we categorised by research areas, themes, and sub-themes. For the function, we grouped the narratives into three categories: Elicit narratives (extracting narratives from collected data); explicit narratives (narratives used to create scenarios); and proposed narratives (recommended narratives). Our results indicate that narratives were not previously used extensively in transport research, but their use is increasing in recent years. We demonstrate that narrative methods are most often used to analyse safety and the social impact of transport. Our analysis suggests that narratives are crucial to understanding and implementing transport policies, a helpful methodological tool to capture values and people's experiences, and therefore a useful way to address sustainable change. We posit that if narratives were more widely adopted and circulated in the transport community, we might see more robust insights into mechanisms required to achieve sustainable policy choices.

Language: en

Keywords

Narrative; Transport; Transport policy; Transport research