Data-informed recommendations for fixed-route public transit in the Greater Susquehanna Valley

Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way (GSVUW) aims to propose a fixed-route bus system across a mostly rural five-county region (Columbia, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder, and Union counties) in Central Pennsylvania to be operated by River Valley Transit (RVT). Regional needs assessments demonstrate a critical lack of public transit, the implementation of which can increase access to medical care and facilitate workforce development. With input from GSVUW and other stakeholders, this paper aims to provide data-informed recommendations for a bus route, bus stops, and time tables that optimize potential ridership and accessibility. Data from the American Community Survey, a United States Census household survey, and from Rabbit Transit, a local ride request service, are employed to quantify and visualize the distribution of potential demand for public transit within the region. Recommendations produced by such analyses will be used by GSVUW to apply for a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation feasibility grant to pilot the fixed-route bus system. This project was completed in a Solving Industrial Problems course at Bucknell University in conjunction with the PIC Math program. PIC Math is a program of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Support is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF grant DMS-1722275). Work was done in collaboration with GSVUW, RVT, and SEDA-COG under the supervision of Professor Nathan Ryan and GIS Specialist Janine Glathar

A novel measure of perceived health to evaluate clinical and demographic influences on health perception

Self-perceived health is often used as a proxy of personal health for research in such diverse fields as population health, epidemiology, medical sociology, and health economics. Perceived health is predictive of chronic disease incidence, recovery, use of medical services, and even mortality. Various scales have been developed in an attempt to quantify perceived health, including the Short Form 12 (SF-12), which has been regarded as the gold standard since its development in 1995. The SF-12 -- though it achieves an effective balance between length, reliability, and validity -- is not included in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which produces vital and health statistics representative of the civilian population of the United States. The present study constructs and validates a novel SF-12-equivalent measure for the NHANES setting using analogous items from the publicly released NHANES interview questionnaires. The distribution of scores of the resulting measure is consistent with general knowledge of population health patterns and closely parallels the behavior of the original SF-12 in selected population subgroups. Once validated, the novel measure is employed in regression analysis to evaluate clinical and demographic influences on health perception among American adults. All analyses account for the complex survey design of NHANES to ensure that results are generalizable to the overall U.S. adult population. Ultimately, the study produces a perceived health scale compatible for use with NHANES, one of the United States\u27 principal sources of population health data, as well as furthers the understanding of clinical and demographic factors that influence self-perceived health

Evaluating clinical and demographic influences on health perception: A translation of the SF-12 for use with NHANES

Improving public health depends on an intricate understanding of the factors that influence how individuals perceive and self-report their personal health. Self-perceived health is an independent predictor of future health-related outcomes, but capturing self-perception of health is complex due to the intricate relationship between clinical and perceived health. A commonly used measure of self-perceived health is the Short Form 12 (SF-12), developed in the 1990s. In this study, we aim to evaluate clinical and demographic influences on self-perceived health among American adults using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). While NHANES captures information on a number of domains of health, including clinical assessments, it does not include SF-12 items necessary to measure self-perceived health. Therefore, to assess self-perceived health for our study, we constructed and validated a novel SF-12-equivalent measure for use with NHANES using analogous items from the 2015–2016 NHANES interview questionnaires. The developed measure reflects established knowledge of population health patterns and closely parallels the behavior of the original SF-12. An analysis of the clinical and demographic influences on this novel measure of health perception revealed that both clinical and demographic factors, such as depression status and race, influence how healthy individuals perceive themselves to be. Importantly, our analysis indicated that among American adults, while controlling for clinical and demographic covariates, an increase in low-density lipoprotein (i.e., “bad”) cholesterol level was associated with an improvement in self-perceived health. This study contributes significantly in two domains: it provides a novel measure of self-perceived health compatible for use with the widely used NHANES data (as well as details on how the process was developed), and it identifies a critical area in need of improved clinical education regarding the apparent confusion around cholesterol health