SIZE - Life quality of senior citizens in relation to mobility conditions
Overview
Background & policy context:
European policies regarding the elderly aim at maintaining their mobility as this is a central element of their integration in society. Senior citizens want to lead an autonomous and independent life (everything from shopping to visiting friends) as much and as long as possible without the help of others (for example the family). Losing the ability to participate in outdoor activities can create a vicious circle of immobility, implying that an important stimulus for the elderly to remain active vanishes. This regularly leads to passivity and loss of competence which affects health. This, in turn may induce still greater isolation and passivity. Thus, the provision of transport and mobility for the elderly is a central societal goal.
Objectives:
- To explain and describe the present mobility and transport situation, the problems, needs and wishes of different groups of senior citizens from their own perspective compared with experts' points of view ("experts" being sociologists, psychologists, traffic experts, experts on gerontology, architects and urban designers, urban planners, politicians, policy makers, experts of other related EU projects, etc.);
- To motivate action by the authorities and other relevant groups in society who are, or feel, responsible in this area, among others by making discrepancies in problem identification transparent;
- To identify relevant solutions for existing problems and to provide guidance for setting up and implementing policies aimed at "keeping the elderly mobile".
These objectives imply a user-oriented approach. The user-oriented approach calls most of all for an analysis of how senior citizens, or different groups of them, perceive today's transport and mobility preconditions. According to communication theories (reflected for example by the marketing model) measures should be built on that analysis. It is a fact, though, that many measures that the users would appreciate are not implemented in practice. This is often the case because the responsible persons or groups - we summarise them under the title "decision makers and experts" here - do not consider implementation feasible. However, we also have the strong suspicion that decision makers and experts often do not really know the needs and interests of groups who are affected by their work, or they have erroneous assumptions about them.
Methodology:
The methodology used in this project is threefold: Qualitative and quantitative studies and heuristic procedures (in the form of workshops).
For the qualitative studies we use focus group interviews (FGI) and in-depth interviews. FGI is an interview with a small group of people on a specific topic. The focus group interview is not a discussion, nor a problem-solving session and not a decision making group. It is an interview. In general, focus groups are conducted with people who do not know each other. The FGIs should deliver the concepts that are relevant from the perspectives of the senior citizens on the one hand and of the decision makers and experts on the other. As a completion of the qualitative approach, an elaboration of the concepts resulting from the FGI is necessary. This is best done with the help of narrative interviews (in-depth interviews). Their goal is to complete the range of arguments which have been collected in the FGI and to better specify and understand points of view about problems in today's mobility.
The standardised study has the function to quantify the materials derived from the qualitative methods, and to arrive at a quantitative empirical representation. With respect to the quantitative part of the project, the focus group interviews and the in depth interviews have the function of elaborating patterns and types of need dispositions, attitudes and every day practices concerning life quality and mobility aspects. The standardised interviews will open an opportunity to analyse the frequency distribution of the relevant variables and their interrelations by applying complex procedures of data. The field work is done by professional institutes, and raw data will be delivered to the respective consortium partners, who will do the statistical analysis. The standardised interviews are carried out in every participant country to get the possibility for a comparative control of the results on the one hand, and on the other hand for the reason that in the end the results of this project are arguments for political decisions. To minimise the artefacts during the data collection and interpretation, for example because of translation problems, it is necessary to pre-test the standardised instrument before a larger sample will be interviewed. As far as representativity is concerned we see to it that the institutes which will carry out the statistical survey act according to the routines of empirical social research.
The third important part of work, besides q
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