October 2012 Archives

According to a study conducted by AARP, baby boomers have greatly impacted travel and travel decisions in the past 40 years. The study focused mainly on collecting and compiling data from sources and interpreting the results. It ranges in time from 1977-2009 and addresses new patterns of travel, historic patterns of travel, questions that arrise, household types, populations, trends in transportation modes, and trends in purpose of travel - specifically medical travel. The research was assembled by AARP with sources including the National Household Travel Survey and Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2010.

The findings of the survey suggest that baby boomers began dual-car households and with that, increased travel. This study suggests that as baby boomers become older, the trends will shift and questions will arise. The study suggests that travel for medical services will continue to increase while new options in public transit continue to arise. With such a cultural emphasis on the environment, many adults will look into new transit options. As baby boomers age, less of this population will be driving. This leads us to another question: will transit evolve to enable baby boomers?

This study is so interesting because the results collected strongly support the theories and because the data has been analyzed over a long period of time, the trends shown hold high predictive validity and reliability.

Check out the study here! :)

http://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/research/public_policy_institute/liv_com/2012/impact-baby-boomers-travel-1969-2009-AARP-ppi-liv-com.pdf

Recently, I was given a small, business-card-sized piece of paper with information about a current survey going on. Because I'm in this class, I thought, "Hey why not? I'll help them out." So I logged into the survey and started, but the survey never ended! It was a series of long, open-ended questions about the dining services at the U of M.

I think that my responses were definitely affected by the length of the survey, and when I hit the 10 minute mark I just exited out of the window. I was so exasperated by the length and amount of open-ended questions, I just quit. Clearly, the questions need to be more stream-lined. The length of the survey needs to be cut-down drastically. If the survey absolutely needs to be that long, put the lengthy questions towards the beginning so it gets easier as you go along! I think this brings a lot of light to what makes a "good" survey and what makes a survey unbearable.