Progress with project

For Project OPAL, we started visiting our volunteers in April 2007 and finished collecting information from them in Autumn 2008. OPAL-Plus visits started in July 2010.

We're analysing the data we’ve collected, and this will continue, even after we've finished OPAL-Plus visits.

For analysis, the team members are divided up into their areas of expertise.  For example, Ken Fox leads on work around the influence of the level of deprivation or affluence of people's neighbourhoods.  Mark Davis is our expert number-cruncher for the activity monitor data we collected.  And Afroditi Stathi and Jo Coulson interpret interview transcripts.

The findings from the study will gradually emerge.  We’ll put them on our publications page.  Keep an eye out!

New projects

Ken Fox and the team have been working through ideas to take our OPAL and OPAL-Plus work onto the next stage.  We will focus on developing 'intervention' research, in other words, policies, programmes and other ideas which could help older people become more active, and maintain their independence. Please visit our related projects page for further details.