Special populations |
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| Chair | Dr Margarida Piteira (ISEG/SOCIUS ) |
University populations are underrepresented in travel behaviour studies in particular regular household travel surveys (HTS). Considered as a hard-to-reach group, they remain under-studied in the travel behaviour analysis arena. As a particular social group, students travel behaviour do differ significantly from other typical working adult especially when regarding lifestyle, trip characteristics, attitudes and preferences.
This paper reports on an undergoing research project MobiCampus-UdL carried out by Transport Urban Planning Economics Laboratory. With a potential to reach about 150 000 students, faculty and staff members, the objective of the research project is to understand university communities daily travel behaviour characteristics not just from a travel demand modelling perspective but as well to help campuses managers in planning coherent measures and define actions.
The administration of a travel survey to the entire university population requires close coordination with university administrative authorities. A deliberate and collaborative process-oriented approach is actually followed by the project team to ensure that all constituents are engaged and supportive of the effort especially to enhance response rate.
A first wave of the web-survey will be carried out in spring 2017. Successive waves will be achieved in the next 3 years with the aim to establish reliable travel behaviour data for the university community across several campuses. The ambition is to set up a permanent “mobility observatory” on overall university population, by collecting longitudinal data including socio-economic, demographic, spatial and travel activity data. Analysis of the survey will include compilation and presentation of descriptive statistics, a more rigorous econometric investigation to understand the complexities of travel behaviour dynamics (intrapersonal variability) and the logic behind travel choices among different university groups (undergraduate students, graduate students and staff) will be also completed.
Another issue of the project is exploring the potential of smartphone travel data collection. As we know university populations are tech-savvy, that was a good opportunity to plan a panel recruitment of voluntary participants who will respond to the first wave of the web survey. The objective of this experimental approach is to verify if this new method of data collection can improve quality/accuracy in temporal and spatial data compared to self-reported information issued from the one-day online survey where we may expect trip under-reporting or travel time over-estimation.
Special populations include not only the children, the elderly persons, the disabled, ethnic minorities, elites, people with special illnesses, migrants and refugees, etc. but also some professional categories. In our presentation we will focus on physicians and dentists which are:
• no contacted caused by their overworked (they work 10 hours or more daily and usually have more than one worksite)
• refused (e.g. waste of time, not interested)
So, how to survey this category of respondents? The only solution seems to be Mixed Mode Design.
In our paper we will present the practical experiences from the field of two surveys conducted among physicians and dentists in Poland. In those surveys the concurrent Mixed Mode Design was applied. The proposed modes were: Postal questionnaire, Web/ EMS survey and Telephone interviewing (not CATI mode)
As the results we achieved the effective sample comparable to the population of physicians and dentists in Poland.
Canadian children and their families living with low income experience intergenerational, intertwining challenges in health, education, family functioning, and well-being. Two-generation, early intervention programs are designed to mitigate challenges for children and families. However, little is known about the processes of change experienced by families who attend two-generation preschool programs. The aim of this mixed methods study was to develop an understanding of these processes at age 10 years following participation in a two-generation preschool program. Objectives of the program include improving child development through strengthening children’s environmental resources, providing access to centre-based early learning, and increasing parental psychosocial resources. Eligibility for the program includes low income and one or more risk factors for developmental delay such as a caregiver with a mental illness, addiction within the family, or social isolation. Eligibility for the study at CUPS One World, included enrollment in the program between 2002 and 2008, for a minimum of 3 consecutive months. Keeping in touch with families included the use of Facebook, reunion parties, fridge magnets, and birthday card reminders. The current study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, with Phase I children’s (N = 134) receptive language scores using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 3rd Edition (PPVT-III), at intake, exit, and age 10 years, informing participant selection for Phase II. Phase II used constructivist grounded theory to develop an understanding of experiences of 14 biological mothers whose children had positive and/or negative changes in their receptive language scores. The core category, Stepping Stones to Resiliency, included four categories: Perceptions of Family; Moving Forward; Achieving Goals; and Completely Different. Perceptions of Family included the categories CUPS Like Family (for recent immigrant families), and CUPS in Place of Family (for other Canadian-born and Aboriginal families). Recent immigrant families had positive, trusting relationships with extended family and for them, CUPS Like Family meant Standing Beside, Keeping in Touch, Learning to Parent, and Working Hard. Other Canadian-born and Aboriginal families had experienced years of family dysfunction due to abuse and neglect, addiction, and ongoing effects of colonization and for them, CUPS in Place of Family meant Homeless at First, Safe Childcare, Leaving Abusive Partners, and Getting Involved. Moving Forward was linked with Perceptions of Family: recent immigrant families could step lightly onto this stone, as it encompassed adjusting to life in Canada; other Canadian-born and Aboriginal families required extra struggle in order to move on to the next stone, following years of overwhelming life circumstances. Achieving Goals meant Children Noticed, One-Stop Shop, and Accessing Education. Completely Different included leaving CUPS One World with newfound Strength, Independence, Freedom, Competency, and Connection. Stepping Stones to Resiliency was not a linear process, it involved stepping backwards, slipping and falling, most importantly, continued resolve to get back on. Parenting programs for families living with low income must extend into lifetimes of connection and continued community. Agencies should assess the benefit of brief, time-limited interventions and consider long-term, intergenerational programming,
Football is the most important sports discipline in Germany. It plays a central role in society and especially in the media. Despite of football's importance its fans can be treated as a special or hard-to-survey population with regards to several methodological issues (e.g. Tourangeau et al. 2014). In this context the distinction between football fans and stadium spectators needs to be drawn. This differentiation is important for scientific issues like research about fear of crime. When surveying football spectators problems originate from various sources. Sampling football spectators in Germany stands out as a problem because of the lack of a specific sampling frame. There are some surveys on this topic, but most research done in the field involves methodological limitations and uses convenience samples as a solution for the problem of a missing sampling frame. There are several possibilities to draw a random sample out of this target population. For example methods to sample rare populations can be used, but are expensive and require a lot of work (e.g. Kalton 2009). In addition, current studies are not carried out as intercept surveys in most cases. This might lead to several disadvantages like problems of including hard-to-reach subgroups, higher costs or retrospective bias.
This paper points out the difficulties in surveying and especially sampling football spectators and discusses possible sampling approaches. It presents a study funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), which uses an approach inspired by line-intercept sampling as a possible way of sampling spectators during their visit of the football stadium. Line-intercept sampling was first described by Canfield (1941) and is frequently used to sample vegetation or animals. The main idea is to place transect lines in a selected area and to record the variable of interest for every object that intersects this transects. Inspired by this technique football stadiums and their surroundings were divided in sectors and members of the target population were systematically sampled along the course of a line by interviewers passing through. Target population were German-speaking stadium visitors aged 14 and older, which were able to participate in the survey. The study was conducted as paper-and-pencil interviews (PAPI) at the stadiums of 17 football clubs of the three professional divisions throughout Germany in the 2014/2015 Bundesliga season (n=2.622).
The suggested sampling technique is appropriate for sampling football spectators because it makes the validation through context data possible. Transmission to other fields of research needs to be examined in individual cases because of the limited opportunities of validation. The quality of the sample was examined by the comparison with known characteristics like the distribution of football spectators inside the stadium. The suggested sampling approach leads to a sample which represents the group of football spectators and it diverges from the target population in a small degree. To put it in a nutshell the presented method achieves adequate sample quality while expenditure and costs remain low.