Tell us about yourself in a paragraph or two: What is your name, and what are you studying? Where are you from? What was your dream job as a kid? What's your favourite thing to do outside of school/work?

My name is Kate Hosford (She/her) and I am a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. My research interests and expertise are in the domains of urban aging and healthy cities. This includes investigating questions related to older adults’ mobility, transportation solutions for an aging population, and urban environments that create healthy, sustainable, and equitable cities for people of all ages. Specifically, my doctoral research aims to contribute evidence to inform the design of transportation policies and programming that can support older adults to live independently and thrive in their communities.

I am a local Metro Vancouverite and have lived in British Columbia (BC) my whole life. Like many people in BC, I love spending time running, hiking, skiing, cycling, and kayaking.

What interested you about the CLSA?

I learned about the CLSA in my third year of my PhD. I had recently shifted the focus of my dissertation to understand how our transportation systems could better support older adults and came across the CLSA while exploring potential secondary data sources.  

Around that same time, I was also doing a Mitacs Research Internship with Dr. Beverley Pitman from the Healthy Aging team at United Way British Columbia. At one of our first meetings in fall 2021, Dr. Pitman mentioned that the non-profit sector is rich in qualitative data but often lacks access to the large-scale quantitative data that is needed to help clarify problems and frame options at a systems level. Immediately, I realized the opportunity to leverage data from the CLSA and my quantitative skills to help bridge this data gap.

What type of research are you doing with CLSA data? Have you published? If so, what are the findings (in lay terms)?

With the support of my PhD supervisor, Dr. Meghan Winters, Dr. Pitman, and United Way BC, I applied for a Health Systems Impact Fellowship through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The goal of the Fellowship is to learn how data from the CLSA can be analyzed to support the Healthy Aging team at United Way BC and the larger community-based seniors’ services sector in advocating for and delivering effective services for older adults in the community. Currently, I am exploring research questions that are most relevant to the transportation efforts of the United Way Healthy Aging team and the Provincial Working Group on Seniors’ Transportation, convened by the Community-Based Seniors’ Services Leadership Council, to identify, research, and propose solutions to the most pressing transportation issues for older adults in BC.

What is the most interesting or surprising thing you've learned from your work with the CLSA? How do you think the CLSA will help you grow as a student or in your future?

The first set of analyses I did with the CLSA was investigating the socio-demographic makeup of the sample and how it compares to the underlying population. As has been reported in previous publications of the CLSA and is the case of many cohort studies, the sample is indeed healthier and wealthier than the general population. This was an important to understand the strengths and limitations of the sample and think through how selection bias may impact the transportation variables I am most interested in.

One transportation variable that I thought was particularly interesting was the types destinations that people reported travelling to in a typical week – the most common was grocery stores, followed by trips for social and recreational purposes. Older participants travelled to fewer different types of destinations per week than younger participants, but trips for groceries and social purposes continued to be the most frequented destinations. Transportation planning and public transit service has typically been planned around the 9-5 commute day, but these findings underscore the different types of trip purposes that transportation should be planned around to support the day-to-day needs of older adults.

I am still in the early stages of synthesizing the results from my analyses, therefore, I will have more to report over the next couple of months.

How do you think the findings using CLSA data will be useful to you, or others, in the future?

The direct knowledge user of my analysis are members of the Provincial Working Group on Seniors Transportation. One of the group’s main focus areas is driving cessation and there exists a whole host of questions available in the CLSA on this topic that can be used to help clarify and frame the advocacy efforts of the group.

I am also assessing the utility of the CLSA data for the community-based seniors’ services sector more broadly. This sector includes all municipal and not-for-profit organizations that provide services and programming for older adults at the local level, including community centres, seniors’ centres, and neighborhood houses.

Do you have any idea about what kind of job you'd like to do when you finish school?

I am keeping my options open for now. Fortunately, my research interests and skills cross-cut many disciplines and therefore, I could see myself enjoying a wide range of roles from epidemiologist, to transportation planner, to professor. I do love working in the area of urban aging and I hope to keep that a part of my career going forward.

What is a non-career related thing that you are grateful for because of your work with the CLSA?

I am grateful for the opportunity to work with data available in the CLSA. I know there is a lot of hard work that has gone into the planning and collection of this data, and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to analyze it and learn from the experiences of the older adults in this cohort.