Value-in-exchange or value-in-use? Empirical insights into consumer perceptions.

This paper considers consumer perceptions of value against the background of emerging paradigm shifts in marketing moving away from traditional transactional ‘value-in-exchange’ approaches where marketers create value for consumers, towards a concept of ‘value-in-use’ where it is the consumer who creates the value with the organisation deemed to be at best only a co-creator. Much of the relevant literature on governmental interventions is located within the public health arena, yet there is little which examines issues of value or value creation. This paper also therefore addresses this gap in the extant literature by considering issues of value in relation to engagement in physical activity and health in a leisure service setting

Assessing the health impact of local amenities: a qualitative study of contrasting experiences of local swimming pool and leisure provision in two areas of Glasgow

Study objective: To assess the health impacts of local public swimming pool and leisure provision. Design: Retrospective qualitative study using focus groups. Reports from two areas with contrasting experience of provision of a public swimming pool (opening and closure) were compared within the context of general reports about health and neighbourhood. Setting: Two deprived neighbourhoods in south Glasgow. Participants: Local adult residents of mixed ages, accessed through local community groups. Main results: In both areas the swimming pool was reported as an important amenity that was linked to health and wellbeing. However, few residents reported regular use of the pool for physical activity. Use of the pool facility for social contact was directly linked to reports of relief of stress and isolation, and improved mental health. Pool closure was one in a series of amenity closures and area decline and was used to represent other area changes. Health impacts were strongly linked to the pool closure. The pool opening was associated with local area regeneration, similar but less prominent links between swimming pool provision and health were reported. Health benefits of social contact were diffuse and linked to other local amenities as well as the new pool facility. Conclusions: Although theoretically linked to increased physical activity, the health benefits conveyed by the swimming pool may be more closely linked to the facilitation of social contact, and a supervised facility for young children. The use of qualitative work to investigate area based change provides rich contextual data to strengthen and explain the reported health impacts

Why don’t people do what’s good for them? : an examination of the value(s) which affect physical activity.

One of the 21st Century’s major public health issues is physical inactivity. Therefore one of the greatest public policy challenges is to find new ways of conferring to an inactive population the health related benefits that arise from being physically active in a way that not only leads to knowledge acquisition, but which also leads to increased levels of participation in physical activity. Participation rates in physical activity across the UK have remained stubbornly static since the mid‐ 1980s and retain a range of gender, age, social‐economic and ethnic participation inequalities. Research has indicated that, when compared to men, women are more likely to: lead sedentary lifestyles (Hausenblas and Symons‐Downs, 2005), experience poor health (Bertakis et al., 2000), and feel more uncomfortable about their body image (Liechty et al., 2006), factors which impact on and/or result in lower participation levels, suggesting that social marketing campaigns to date have been largely ineffective. A central tenet of social marketing is to achieve a voluntary, not forced or coerced behaviour change by emphasising a value proposition that induces action from the consumer. Set in the context of publicly funded leisure facilities this paper offers empirical insights regarding the drivers, constraints and consumption values underpinning women’s participation in physical activity. Our results suggest that value perceptions regarding the costs, benefits and enjoyment of exercise do not differ with gender. However, statistically significant differences exist between the genders regarding: the physical environment within which exercise occurs; the quality of service experience; and intrinsic factors such as social and altruistic value. Insights gained from this research may be able to inform policymakers and leisure services providers regarding more effective methods of engaging ‘hard‐to‐reach’ groups, such as women. Specifically, our findings suggest that exercise adoption is likely to be increased with targeted social marketing campaigns which focus on emphasising the experiential aspects of consuming physical activity viewed from the perspective of value‐in‐use rather than from the traditional price‐based perspective that tends to focus on the trade off of costs against benefits

Towards developing understanding of the drivers, constraints from the consumption values underpinning participation in physical activity.

Overall participation rates in physical activity across the UK have remained relatively static since the mid 1980s, with attendant causes for concern about the inequality of participation rates amongst various target groups that may be worthy of specific investigation. Behaviour change models from the fields of leisure studies, consumer behaviour and social psychology offer conceptualisation of a notion of exchange underpinning the expectancy-value process, noting that, in order to facilitate a voluntary exchange there needs to be a value proposition that induces action and/or motivates effort from the consumer. It is therefore reasonable to assume that such value expectations will also influence health behaviour intentions. This paper therefore aims to offer a more developing understanding of the drivers, constraints and experiential consumption values underpinning participation in physical activity. Results suggest that, rather than focusing on the social and altruistic values of behavioural changes, and given that the functional value of participation is already well-known (if not always acted upon) through social marketing campaigns’ educational efforts and through the media, it may be worth policymakers and leisure service providers focusing more on highlighting the emotional benefits to be gained, especially when targeting women to increase their participation in physical activit

Giving urban policy its 'medical': assessing the place of health in area-based regeneration

How does regeneration affect health and how have successive urban policy evaluations sought to measure such impacts? This article draws on a systematic review of national-level evaluation documentation relating to government-funded, area-based regeneration initiatives in the UK since 1980. The review examined whether health impacts had been intended and, if so, how they had been measured. The process and difficulties of conducting the review raise significant questions about policy formulation and evaluation. Is evidence-based policy possible where evaluations are not stored centrally? In short, a model policy development as 'enlightened' or incremental is hard to sustain where a lack of systematic storage of data means that researchers, policy makers and practitioners may struggle to produce clear answers to important policy questions

Do urban regeneration programmes improve public health and reduce health inequalities? A synthesis of the evidence from UK policy and practice (1980–2004)

Objectives: To synthesise data on the impact on health and key socioeconomic determinants of health and health inequalities reported in evaluations of national UK regeneration programmes. Data Sources: Eight electronic databases were searched from 1980 to 2004 (IBSS, COPAC, HMIC, IDOX, INSIDE, Medline, Urbadisc/Accompline, Web of Knowledge). Bibliographies of located documents and relevant web sites were searched. Experts and government departmental libraries were also contacted. Review methods: Evaluations that reported achievements drawing on data from at least two target areas of a national urban regeneration programme in the UK were included. Process evaluations and evaluations reporting only business outcomes were excluded. All methods of evaluation were included. Impact data on direct health outcomes and direct measures of socioeconomic determinants of health were narratively synthesised. Results: 19 evaluations reported impacts on health or socioeconomic determinants of health; data from 10 evaluations were synthesised. Three evaluations reported health impacts; in one evaluation three of four measures of self reported health deteriorated, typically by around 4%. Two other evaluations reported overall reductions in mortality rates. Most socioeconomic outcomes assessed showed an overall improvement after regeneration investment; however, the effect size was often similar to national trends. In addition, some evaluations reported adverse impacts. Conclusion: There is little evidence of the impact of national urban regeneration investment on socioeconomic or health outcomes. Where impacts have been assessed, these are often small and positive but adverse impacts have also occurred. Impact data from future evaluations are required to inform healthy public policy; in the meantime work to exploit and synthesise "best available" data is required

Evaluation of GHA’s youth diversionary programme

To assist with funding decisions in this area and to build an evidence base, GHA commissioned an evaluation of a selection of its youth diversionary programmes in 2007

Sound propagation over uneven ground and irregular topography

The goal of this research is to develop theoretical, computational, and experimental techniques for predicting the effects of irregular topography on long range sound propagation in the atmosphere. Irregular topography here is understood to imply a ground surface that is not idealizable as being perfectly flat or that is not idealizable as having a constant specific acoustic impedance. The interest of this study focuses on circumstances where the propagation is similar to what might be expected for noise from low-attitude air vehicles flying over suburban or rural terrain, such that rays from the source arrive at angles close to grazing incidence. The activities and developments that have resulted during the period, August 1986 through February 1987, are discussed

Competitive contagion in networks

We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to “seed” the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. We identify a general property of the adoption dynamics — namely, decreasing returns to local adoption — for which the inefficiency of resource use at equilibrium (the Price of Anarchy) is uniformly bounded above, across all networks. We also show that if this property is violated, even the Price of Stability can be unbounded, thus yielding sharp threshold behavior for a broad class of dynamics. We provide similar results for a new notion, the Budget Multiplier, that measures the extent to which the imbalances in player budgets can be amplified at equilibrium

IST\u27s DIS Pdu Flooder: Final Report

Report on distributed interactive simulation application which is able to place large numbers of syntactically and semantically correct distributed interactive simulation protocol data units on a network to simulate the traffic that would be generated by multiple distributed interactive simulation applications