36 research outputs found

    A Comprehensive Persona Template to Understand Citizens' Mobility Needs

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    In the city of Kaiserslautern, an urban district is being built, that aims to be climate-neutral. To achieve this aim, innovative concepts and technologies for energy generation and mobility services are to be applied. For the mobility concept, we needed personas as inhabitants and stakeholders are not living there yet. Since we could not find a persona template for the documentation of travelers’ needs, we designed a persona template that provides a comprehensive picture of travel needs. We took a template based on Alan Cooper’s idea and customized it to fit the topic of mobility, adding personality traits that are the basis of concrete mobility requirements. We also added characteristics of a person according to their stage of life, because personality traits hardly change over a person’s lifetime. In addition, we included attitudes towards sustainability and technology. A description of the life situation together with the usual travel destinations and trip companions is also part of the persona template. The design of our template allows it to be used in other projects as well. We created personas based on our template and used them in two different workshops. The participants were able to use the personas without much explanation. A plan for further evaluation is presented in the discussion

    Childhood mortality and quality of care among abandoned children in nineteenth-century Italy

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    A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted in recent years to the large-scale abandonment of newborn babies in the European past, with special emphasis given to the staggering rates of infant mortality among the foundlings. For the most part, scholars have agreed with the foundling home officials of the past in assigning much of the blame for this excess mortality to the women who took in the foundlings as wetnurses and subsequently as foster mothers. This article takes issue with this view, based on an examination of the children abandoned at the foundling home of Bologna, Italy in the nineteenth century. Four cohorts of foundlings are examined - those abandoned in 1809-30, 1829-30, 1849-50, and 1869-70 (N=3615) - as we trace the changing pattern of infant and early childhood mortality. Longitudinal methods are used in examining the life course of these foundlings and the determinants of their mortality

    Exploring rebound effects from a psychological perspective

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    The analysis of energy efficiency rebound effects from a psychological perspective has just begun, and empirical studies analysing psychological factors in relation to the rebound effect are still scarce. In this chapter, we first identify possible psychological drivers to explain rebound effects based on psychological action theories. The outlined psychological framework suggests that energy efficiency improvements have different effects on behaviour depending on the interaction of psychological factors such as attitudes, personal and social norms and response efficacy. In a second step,we present results from an empirical study using focus group discussions to explore rebound effects and psychological drivers in the transport and residential sectors. The results are in line with the outlined psychological framework and indicate that need satiation, habits and mistaken beliefs about the optimal usage of a technology also seem to play a role. Finally, research questions are outlined to help further develop and test hypotheses on the psychological factors influencing rebound effects
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