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Personal travel is undertaken principally as a means of access: to opportunities, services, social networks and other goods. The Internet now provides an additional form of access, enabling many activities to be reached without recourse to physical mobility by the individual undertaking the activity. However, the social and transport effects of this 'virtual mobility' are uncertain. Here, it is argued that the incidence and properties of multitasking are a necessary part of the assessment of such impacts. Participation in activities and, thus, change in activity participation will not be fully measured without consideration of the parallel conduct of activities. This paper presents a review, empirical evidence and discussion to support this hypothesis. Emergent from an examination of the literature and examined by new empirical evidence are three observations or hypotheses, namely that: (1), failure to consider multitasking leads to the underreporting of key activities; (2), misrepresentation of activity participation tends to be more pronounced for certain key groups; and (3), lack of awareness of multitasking could lead to the flawed measurement and thus misrepresentation of behaviour change over time. Further to these observations from the literature, study findings suggest that multitasking behaviour is also found to vary according to whether the primary activity is being undertaken online or offline. Taken together, the empirical evidence confirms that the consideration of multitasking is likely to have important implications for the study of travel, Internet use and interactions between the two.

This paper reports findings from research into the possibility that mobility-related social exclusion could be affected by an increase in access to virtual mobility -access to opportunities, services and social networks, via the Internet -amongst populations that experience exclusion. Transport is starting to be recognised as a key component of social policy, particularly in light of a number of recent studies, which have highlighted the link between transport and social exclusion, suggesting that low access to mobility can reduce the opportunity to participate in society -a finding with which this research concurs. Following the identification of this causal link, the majority of studies suggest that an increase in access to adequate physical mobility can provide a viable solution to mobility-related aspects of social exclusion. This paper questions the likelihood that increased physical mobility can, by itself, provide a fully viable or sustainable solution to mobility-related aspects of social exclusion. Findings from both a desk study and public consultation suggest that virtual mobility is already fulfilling an accessibility role, both substituting for and supplementing physical mobility, working to alleviate some aspects of mobility-related social exclusion in some sectors of society. The paper incorporates an analysis of the barriers to and problems with an increase in virtual mobility in society, and concludes that virtual mobility could be a valuable tool in both social and transport policy.

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Pressure for increased school accountability is a distinctive hallmark of the present period of educational reform. Accountability, as presently defined in state and local educational policy, includes four major ideas: the school is the basic unit for the delivery of education and hence the primary place where teachers and administrators are held to account; schools are primarily accountable for student performance, generally defined as measured achievement on tests in basic academic subjects; school-site student performance is evaluated against externally-set standards that define acceptable levels of student achievement as mandated by states or localities; and evaluation of school performance is typically accompanied by a system of rewards, penalties, and intervention strategies targeted at rewarding successful schools and remediating or closing lowperforming schools (Ladd, 1996). These accountability policies are typically directed toward individual schools or teachers, and increasingly, students, as in Texas, New York, Virginia, and Florida where exit exams or proficiency requirements are central to educational reform policies. Coupled with these new accountability systems, states and localities often are pursuing policies such as charter schools and choice programs that move schools outside the existing bureaucratic structure and are intended to sharpen the focus on academic quality and student performance. Growing political and fiscal pressure on schools lies behind this conception of accountability. The political pressure stems from the increasing visibility of school performance as a policy issue at the state and local levels and the increasing capacity of states and localities to measure and monitor student achievement. The fiscal pressure derives from heightened awareness of accountability present in the literature on school reform, but to leave the definitions as open as possible.This study is focused primarily on schools and how they construct their own conceptions of accountability. We chose this focus for conceptual and practical reasons. First, we are interested in understanding how teachers, administrators, students, and parents think about and behave toward accountability issues in schools, apart from how they respond to new external accountability systems. Schools function, in part, as accountability systems in their own right, and these systems are worth understanding in and of themselves. Second, we are interested in learning, from the variations we observe among schools, about the range of responses that schools of various types formulate to the problem of accountability. To the degree that schools vary in their responses to the accountability problem, we learn something about how conceptions of accountability are formed and how they change in the daily life of schools. Third, we are ultimately interested in joining our research on school-level accountability with research on external accountability systems to understand the sources of school-site variation in response to state and l...

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This paper examines boys' and girls' housework in a Nordic welfare state which is characterized by both high labor market participation rates for mothers and fathers and a narrow income distribution which makes it expensive for ordinary parents to hire paid household help. We use data from the European Community Household Panel Survey 1998 and run tobit-regressions to take the number of children reporting no housework into consideration. The results show that children do only a minor part of the total housework, and that boys participate less than girls. There is a positive impact of mothers' full time work on children's housework, while mothers having a higher education level decrease boys' participation in housework. Finally, the time children spend on paid work is found more positively correlated with girls' than with boys' contributions to housework.