An assessment of the ecological validity of immersive videos in stated preference surveys

Abstract

Images, videos, and virtual reality have been widely used in the literature to portray complex attributes to survey respondents. It is reasonable to expect immersive videos will be increasingly used in the future due to their decreasing costs and potentially more accurate representation of reality. Nevertheless, the literature has not sufficiently tested their ecological validity, which can be defined as the extent to which the results they produce in a laboratory setting, such as in choice experiments, are close enough to the results that would have been obtained in a real-life setting. The following work presents a comparison of two representation formats, images and immersive videos, to verify if they can elicit the same perceptual responses of pedestrians as real environments. To do this, a survey was carried out using these two formats as well as on-site interviews. Using a MIMIC approach, and after controlling for all relevant sociodemographic variables, results show that perceptions elicited through immersive videos were not different to those elicited in reality in one qualitative variable (perception of safety and security) out of three relevant ones identified. Furthermore, results also show immersive videos consistently induce a smaller distortion than photographs.