How Best to Serve Seniors on Existing Transit Services, MTI Report 01-04

Increases in the size of the elderly population and changes in travel patterns are expected to create significant new mobility expectations. The research documented here is intended to provide tools for transit providers and public policy makers to make the greatest use of existing transit resources to serve mobility needs of the growing senior population. The research demonstrates how customer satisfaction surveys can be used to set priorities for improving existing fixed route services. The primary analysis technique used is the impact score technique. This method determines the relative impact of various improvements on overall customer satisfaction. It does this by measuring how much customers’ overall satisfaction changes depending on their satisfaction with particular aspects of service. Satisfaction data from rider surveys from three West Coast transit systems were analyzed, comparing the responses of seniors and non-seniors. Many of the results are specific to individual transit systems; however, a number of general patterns were observed: 1) in general, seniors appear to rate service attributes more highly than do non-seniors; 2) while importance scores for non-seniors tended to cluster together, the results for seniors appear to indicate that certain service attributes are significantly more important than others; 3) at the two systems that used a similar method of survey administration and question format, there is broad consistency in importance ratings for seniors. Among the most important attributes at both systems were drivers, reliable equipment, and on-time performance. Direct questioning suggests that the greatest increase in ridership would result from adding service. However, the impact analysis shows that other improvements could have a greater impact on customer satisfaction

Palliative and End of Life Care for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic Groups in the UK

This report marks the start of a programme of work by many partners. A better understanding of the nation's changing demographics, of the needs of individual ethnic and cultural groups and of the types of services which will best meet their end of life care needs must be early outputs from the partnership. There are many areas which researchers will investigate further and many opportunities for service providers to work together with local communities to develop care which is sensitive and responsive to their needs as well as on a scale which will be needed for the large numbers of people who could benefi

Easy in Any Language: Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics of Activity-Oriented Adjectives in Six Languages

Words that denote the degree of effort required for some activity, called easy adjectives here, have distinctive behavior. This behavior is explored in six languages to determine how the semantics of these words is reflected in the expressions to which they can apply, the constructions in which they appear, and their use in discourse. For four Indo-European languages, English, Spanish, German, and Russian, the analysis is based on random samples from linguistic corpora. For two non-Indo-European languages, Japanese and Swahili, the analysis is based on consultant elicitations and published examples. The analysis confirms that easy adjectives have distinctive behavior compared to prototypical adjectives that describe properties of things. In every language studied, easy adjectives (such as English easy, difficult, and hard) apply exclusively to: finite and non-finite clauses; Noun Phrases (NPs) that denote activities, including de-verbal nominalizations; NPs that act as metonymies for activities due to frame-semantic associations; NPs that appear in constructions along with an explicitly stated activity; and pro-forms with non-specific antecedents. Details are given of the specific constructions employed in these patterns, showing how a variety of syntactic means are employed in different languages to achieve the same functions. Corpus data for the four Indo-European languages are used to show how the behavior of evaluation adjectives (those that describe the value, cost, or benefit of an activity) differs from that of easy adjectives despite some similarities that have been the focus of prior literature