In the wake of deinstitutionalization, people with psychiatric disabilities are, to a great extent, living in the community. In this thesis everyday life of people with psychiatric disabilities, living in independent housing with community-based social support to manage their daily life, is investigated. Special attention is paid to the characteristics and meaning of community-based social support. Through participating observational studies, interviews and time-geographic diaries, data have been gathered about everyday life of seventeen men and women. It is the interpersonal social conditions that have been the main target of the study, addressed as social networks and social support. Everyday life conditions are dependent on social as well as physical and material circumstances. Although the social conditions are emphasized in the study they are not looked upon as isolated dimensions but as part of everyday life circumstances. The everyday life perspective offers an opportunity to reveal the structures within which everyday life takes place. The time-geographic concepts “community-organized projects” and “individual-organized projects” were used to investigate the structures of everyday life, resulting in four substructures. Four types of everyday life and four patterns of networks connected to the different substructures were identified, showing great variations. The characteristics of community-based social support can be summarized as “the doing”, “the talking” and “the being with” in a reciprocal type of relationship. The meaning of support is shortly described as solution of and relieving problems, social companionship, security, protection and control. Community-based social support show similar importance regardless of the type of everyday life when it comes to solution of problems and different importance when it comes to aspects of support such as social companionship.

Scientists are now able to collect ubiquitous data on individual-level movement at increasingly fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Despite this surge in data availability, methods for extracting relevant information about spatial-temporal movement patterns remain limited in scope and sophistication. The objective of this PhD research is to develop novel quantitative approaches for analyzing spatial-temporal patterns in modern movement datasets. A review of the state-of-the-art in quantitative movement analysis identifies the current breadth of available methods, while highlighting key limitations and fragmentation in the literature across multiple disciplines. Existing theory from the geographical literature, namely time geography is applied to a novel application – wildlife movement ecology (termed the PPA home range), in an attempt to expose these ideas to wildlife researchers. The PPA home range method has several advantages over existing methods, most notably its ability to identify omission and commission error in existing home range techniques. Next, an advance to time geography theory is proposed for incorporating object kinetics (i.e., velocity and acceleration) into a probabilistic movement model termed kinetic-based probabilistic time geography. Kinetic-based probabilistic time geography provides a more accurate model for predicting object movement when object kinetics are relevant (e.g., with fast moving vehicles, or athletes). A novel method (termed the DI index) for quantifying dynamic interactions between moving objects is presented, focusing specifically on examining cohesive movement behaviour. The DI index is advantageous over existing dynamic interaction measures in that it is computed at the local level, facilitating a finer treatment of interactive movement behaviour. The DI index is then contrasted with seven alternative measures of dynamic interaction to examine the effectiveness of each at identifying expected and unexpected interactive behaviour, at a range of sampling resolutions, in the context of wildlife movement ecology. The results highlight the value of the DI index, especially as a local level index, capable of identifying variable and infrequent interactions in pairs of moving objects. In summary, this dissertation contributes to the rapidly expanding body of quantitative movement research by providing: 1) a cross-disciplinary methodological review, 2) expanding the application of core time geography theory to wildlife ecology, 3) advancing time geographic theory in development of kinetic-based probabilistic time geography, 4) developing a novel index (the DI index) for measuring inter-object interactions, and 5) examining the effectiveness of available dynamic interaction measures, and their sensitivity across sampling resolutions, in the context of wildlife ecology. / Graduate / 0366 / 0463 / 0329

The spread of infectious diseases can be described in terms of three interrelated components: interaction, movement, and scale. Transmission between individuals requires some form of interaction, which is dependent on the pathogen, to occur. Diseases spread through the movement of their hosts; they spread across many spatial scales from local neighborhoods to countries, or temporal scales from days to years, or periodic intervals. Prior research into the spread of disease have examined diffusion processes retrospectively at regional or country levels, or developed differential equation or simulation models of the dynamics of disease transmission. While some of the more recent models incorporate all three components, they are limited in the way they understand where interactions occur. The focus has been on home or work, including contact with family or coworkers. The models reflect a lack of knowledge about how transmissions are made at specific locations in time, so-called nodes of transmission. That is, how individuals’ intersections in time and space function in disease transmission. This project sought to use the three factors of interaction, movement, and scale to better understand the spread of disease in terms of the place of interaction called the node of transmission. The overarching objective of this research was: how can nodes of transmission be identified through individual activity spaces incorporating the three factors of infectious disease spread: interaction, movement, and scale? This objective fed into three main sub-objectives: defining nodes of transmission, developing an appropriate methodology to identifying nodes of transmission, and applying it using geotagged social media data from Twitter. To develop an appropriate framework, this research relied on time geography, and traditional disease. This particularly relied on the idea of bundling to create the nodes, and a nesting effect that integrated scale. The data source used to identify nodes of transmission was collected from Twitter for the Los Angeles County, USA, area from October 2015 to February 2016. Automated text classification was used to identify messages where users self-reported an influenza-like-illness. Different groupings were created that combined both the syndrome and the symptoms of influenza, and applied to the automated classification. The use of Twitter for small-area health analysis was evaluated along with different text classification methodologies. A space-time hierarchical clustering technique was adapted to be applied towards the twitter data in both identifying nodes of transmission and identifying spatiotemporal contact networks. This clustering data was applied to the classified Twitter data to look at where interaction between the classified users were occurring. This pointed to six nodes that were typically densely populated areas that saw the merging of large groups of people in Los Angeles (e.g. Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard).The movement of these individuals were also examined by using a edit distance to compare their visits to different clusters and nodes.

Traditional network design problems only consider the long-term stationary travel patterns (e.g., fixed OD demand) and short-term variations of human mobility are ignored. This study aims to integrate human mobility characteristics and travel patterns into network design problems using a space-time network structure. Emerging technologies such as location-based social network platforms provide a unique opportunity for understanding human mobility patterns that can lead to advanced modeling techniques. To reach our goal, at first multimodal network design problems are investigated by considering safety and flow interactions between different modes of transport. We develop a network reconstruction method to expand a single-modal transportation network to a multi-modal network where flow interactions between different modes can be quantified. Then, in our second task, we investigate the trajectory of moving objects to see how they can reveal detailed information about human travel characteristics and presence probability with high-resolution detail. A time geography-based methodology is proposed to not only estimate an individual’s space-time trajectory based on his/her limited space-time sample points but also to quantify the accuracy of this estimation in a robust manner. A series of measures including activity bandwidth and normalized activity bandwidth are proposed to quantify the accuracy of trajectory estimation, and cutoff points are suggested for screening data records for mobility analysis. Finally, a space-time network-based modeling framework is proposed to integrate human mobility into network design problems. We construct a probabilistic network structure to quantify human’s presence probability at different locations and time. Then, a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model is proposed to maximize the spatial and temporal coverage of individual targets. To achieve near optimal solutions for large-scale problems, greedy heuristic, Lagrangian relaxation and simulated annealing algorithms are implemented to solve the problem. The proposed algorithms are implemented on hypothetical and real world numerical examples to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the methodology on different network sizes and promising results have been obtained.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how people in Skellefteå municipality transport behavior looks like. Skellefteå municipality is working on developing the traffic planning, but are the improvement opportunities similar to that the people in this study put forward. To investigate what limitations and other underlying factors there are that can influence these people's choice of means of transport. To see if these people could consider switching to using more environmentally friendly means of transport during their daily commute. Since Skellefteå municipality's goal is that car use within the municipality should not continue to relatively increase. To investigate and analyze this, seven respondents from the municipality of Skellefteå were interviewed, what their daily commutes look like and their experiences and opinions within the various transport options. The results show that depending on the stage of life the respondents are in, there are more or fewer restrictions on their daily commute. The people in the study also faced limitations in their daily commute that could be explained by restrictions in time geography that affected their movement between their home and work. With all aspects in mind, changing means of transport within the daily commute is seen as complex. Currently, the people in this study do not see public transport in Skellefteå as an alternative that would replace the car within their daily commute, as public transport does not meet their needs. But to use a bicycle within its daily commute as more likely, as the measures presented by the municipality and the improvement opportunities presented by the respondents in this study agreed to some extent. The development that the municipality of Skellefteå is carrying out in pedestrian and bicycle traffic could lead to these respondents switching to a certain extent using bicycles as an alternative means of transport within their daily commute. Nudging is used to see how the municipality of Skellefteå works with measures that could promote traffic behavior among the municipality's residents, which could result in more environmentally friendly passenger traffic.

The thesis aims to explore accessibility to sports facilities for 10-20-year-old girls with foreign background and their experiences of being a prioritized group, as stated in political sports programs. The participation in sports is low for this group and in Stockholm municipality, where there is a shortage of sports facilities, there are few opportunities to practice. Doing mixed methods, integrating maps made in GIS and interviews, both spatial and spatial-temporal accessibility was explored in order to get a comprehensive understanding of accessibility to sports facilities. By interviewing their coaches, experiences regarding how they are prioritized and what obstacles they face are explored. Further, previous research of accessibility is mainly about proximity and distribution, therefore, I include time as an aspect, using time-geography as an analytical tool to understand the experiences. The result shows time plays an important role, that they don’t feel prioritized and that they experience problems regarding transportation. Furthermore, the thesis discusses the conflict of optimal sports facility use and inclusion, how planning practice can contribute to a more inclusive sports environment and some implications for change.

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The study of everyday life has become a new challenge in contemporary society. Over the last few decades there have been significant changes of temporal and spatial relationships, which now come in many different forms, some of which are relatively new phenomena (e.g. virtual relationships). The society differentiates also socially and culturally. People with different attitudes and values, habits and behaviours, people of different lifestyles meet at one place and encounter everyday lives of others. These facts demonstrate the importance of everyday life research. Everyday life is routine and self-evident for a man or group of people in a given space and time but otherwise it is variable and differentiated phenomenon. New issues arise in the context of contemporary changes that encourage the questioning the definitions of everyday life and also finding new methods of research. The thesis searches for the position of geography in the research of everyday life and thus contributes to the formation of a subdiscipline of geography that is not yet fully developed. Responding to approaches influenced by Time geography, which tend to reduce the daily lives of people on a path through time-space and create models of human behaviour, the thesis tries to "humanize" the path using concepts that reflect the...

This Master's thesis focuses on the spatial mobility of secondary school students and the way they spend their leisure time. Rychnov nad Kněžnou town and its surrounding is chosen for the empirical study. The topic of the thesis connects several disciplines especially geography, sociology and psychology in the theoretical part. Special attention is given to the Time Geography and the explanation of the concept of leisure time in the teen-agers's life. The research on the students from different types of secondary schools in Rychnov nad Kněžnou is the main part of the thesis where the method of questionnaire and diary is used. The objective of the survey is to explore daily activities of teen-agers in the time and space. Questions are focused especially on the way the respondents spend their leisure time. Stated activities are compared with the supply of leisure services in the region. The attention in the survey is also paid to the missing leisure services.

<p>Tourism is a spatial phenomenon. Tourist behaviour on-site is not only dependent on the destination itself, but also on the situation in other places, tourists’ spatial mobility and access to information. On the basis of this argument, the whole tourism system is taken into account in this thesis. The aim is to analyse the interplay between mobility, tourist behaviour and guidebooks. The focus lies on German tourists in Sweden. Due to the importance of guidebooks to this visitor group, the thesis concentrates particularly on guidebooks as source of information.</p><p>In the first article, power relations that steer the selection of Swedish tourist sites in German guidebooks are analysed. The results show that the selection of tourist sites is dependent on personal, editorial, geographical, economic and tourism-sociological factors. The production of information is dependent on a complex web of power relations, the core of which is constituted by authors, publishers and readers.</p><p>In the second article, the content in German guidebooks on Sweden is analysed. Besides Stockholm and Northern Lapland, the regions presented most frequently are usually located in the south of the country. It is found that guidebooks influence German tourists’ choices of tourist sites in Sweden, and that this influence increases with the distance from Germany. The study also shows that guidebooks contribute to constructing tourism space and providing places with meaning.</p><p>In the third article, it is shown that information and time availability influence tourist mobility. The existence of an individual travel rhythm is confirmed, which is defined as a travel pattern that is independent of the tourist sites that are visited. It includes, among other things, long travel distances the first and last days of the holiday, a short first stay-over, the longest stay in the region with the greatest distance from home, and a relation between the length of stay at one place and the distance covered when departing.</p><p>In the last article, tourist behaviour is analysed. The results dispel the predominant impression in current tourism discourse that states that tourists are continually active during their holidays. It is found that the major difference between home and tourist behaviour is not constituted by the activities themselves, but by a difference in place, followed by a slower pace in which activities are performed and a limited time period. Spatial mobility, the characteristics of place and access to information all influence tourist behaviour on-site.</p><p>In conclusion, it is found that tourist information, mobility and behaviour on the spot are closely connected. Tourists consume the tourism space created in guidebooks, and recreate this space when travelling, as they choose individually how to respond to the information provided. Actors, places and tourist structures all exist in relation to each other. For the resulting behaviour in place, this means that it is not only the supply at the destination that is important, but also the situation in tourists’ home regions and along their travel routes.</p>