Lorna Jennifer Philip

University of Aberdeen | ABDN · Department of Geography and Environment

Over a quarter of all adults in Scotland give freely of their time as volunteers and support a diverse range of organisations, activities, services and facilities. Analysis of Scottish Household Survey data elucidates patterns of volunteering among older people in Scotland, and the nature of formal and informal volunteering in different rural commu...

Rural spaces and places are usually characterised by low population densities and remoteness from urban centres, where services and facilities are concentrated. Within this largely functional context, there is, in the many countries within the Global North, assumed notions of rural areas being characterised by neighbourliness, strong community spir...

The Sheep and Trees initiative was introduced by the Scottish Government in 2017 as part of wider efforts to support farm diversification and the promotion of tree planting aligned with meeting sustainable development objectives. Designed to promote integrated forestry in upland farming across Scotland, the initiative has, to date, had a very low u...

Many areas of Great Britain were badly affected by flooding over a fourteen-week period in the winter of 2015/2016. The flooding had considerable impacts on numerous communities, including private homes, business premises, transport infrastructure and agricultural land. In Scotland, in early December 2015, severe flooding affected the south of the...

Across a number of disciplines at the University of Aberdeen, there is a long tradition of research focused upon the interrogation of issues associated with rural places and rural communities. Since the mid-1960s, rural geographical research has been a prominent component of the research undertaken by academic staff in Geography. Drawing upon an an...

In the context of demographically ageing communities across rural Europe Smart Villages have considerable potential to promote ageing healthy. Whilst in principle supporting healthy ageing in the context of the Smart Village might appear a relatively straightforward endeavour, in operational terms, successful development of smart, 21 st century vil...

Prior to the amalgamation of Aberdeen’s two medieval universities in 1860, Geography had been taught to undergraduate students at both King’s and Marischal Colleges since at least the late 16th Century. First mooted in the early 1900s, it was not until 1919 that a lectureship in Geography at Aberdeen was created and a ‘Department of Geography’ came...

Definition Rural ageing refers to the implications of ageing, patterns, processes, and outcomes, in rural contexts. Rural ageing research considers the experiences of those who age in rural environments (and should include the perspectives of older adults themselves) and the implications of rural ageing for rural communities and stakeholders such a...

Synonyms (if any) Rural gerontology Definition Ageing is a bio-social process that has implications for many aspects of society and the economy. Rural Ageing refers to the implications of ageing, patterns, processes and outcomes, in rural contexts. In this chapter, the focus is on the rural contexts of the Global North. Rural ageing research consid...

The digital economy offers home based micro-businesses in rural areas many advantages but stubborn social, economic and territorial digital divides continue to create challenges for this sector of the rural economy. Complex digital inequalities are illustrated in our case studies of the digital behaviour and Internet experiences of those running mi...

Imaginative or other metaphorical methods of travel are increasingly important in later life, as challenges associated with physical travel can increase. Opportunities for the stimulation of imaginative travel may be particularly important for older adults, yet limited due to difficulties related to engaging with the wider community and spending ti...

The research was undertaken during the Next Generation Broadband (NGB) upgrade programme, the Broadband UK Delivery programme, across North East Scotland. It addressed three objectives: first, to identify and then track the NGB deployment across the North East of Scotland; second, to investigate business use of internet communication technologies (...

The Internet can bestow significant benefits upon those who use it. The prima facie case for an urban-rural digital divide is widely acknowledged, but detailed accounts of the spatial patterns of digital communications infrastructure are rarely reported. In this paper we present original analysis of data published by the UK telecommunications regul...

Research presentation delivered at the University of Macerata’s International Seminars Week, December 2016

In the UK, the geography of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure required for Internet connectivity is such that high speed broadband and mobile phone networks are generally less available in rural areas compared with urban areas or, in other words, as remoteness and population sparsity increase so too does the likelihood o...

This paper explores the perspicacity of the ‘path-dependency' thesis for explaining pre- and post-retirement migration, extending existing debates in the literature on path-dependency retirement regions (Brown et al. 2011). The paper presents a case study of pre- and post-retirement migration to the Isle of Bute, Scotland. Drawing on findings from...

Proceedings of the XXVI European Society for Rural Sociology Congress. ISBN 978-0-902701-14-4

Digital communication is a routine element of everyday life. Well-established communications technologies such as telephones and televisions have been joined, more recently, by widespread use of mobile telecommunications and by digital connectivity associated with the Internet. The use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) relies upon...

By using detailed data on Internet access and use in rural and urban areas of Britain, we show the effect of low-speed broadband connection on people’s use of the Internet and the services it provides. We use a three-fold definition of deep rural, shallow rural, and urban areas to explore the nature of the digital divides between these areas, and t...

New and existing information communication technologies (ICT) are playing an increasingly important role in the delivery of health and social care services. eHealth1 has the potential to supplement in-person home visits for older, rural adults with chronic pain. The Technology to support Older Adults' Personal and Social Interaction project-TOPS-ex...

By using detailed data on Internet access and use in rural and urban areas of Britain, we show the effect of low-speed broadband connection on people’s use of the Internet and the services it provides. We use a three-fold definition of deep rural, shallow rural, and urban areas to explore the nature of the digital divides between these areas, and t...

Abstract – The Digital Economy has opened up new opportunities for societal wellbeing across many domains of life. However, the market dependency of the landscape of connection has resulted in communities which have inadequate broadband infrastructure and are off the digital map. This form of digital exclusion is most notable in remote, rural areas...

Abstract – Chronic conditions can impede an individual’s ability to engage in activities that promote wellbeing in later life. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can potentially offer benefits to well-being through novel modes of interaction, which could be particularly beneficial for older adults living with chronic conditions in rur...

Providing health services to an ageing population is challenging, and in rural areas even more so. It is expensive to provide high quality services to small populations who are widely dispersed; staff and patients are often required to travel considerable distances to access services, and the economic downturn has created a climate where delivery c...

eHealth technologies are being promoted by government as an integral part of the future delivery of health and social care services. Demographic ageing is most pronounced in rural areas and eHealth technologies could support care models designed to help the growing number of rural older people living independently in their own homes. Successful dep...

By using detailed data on Internet access and use in rural and urban areas of Britain, we show the effect of low-speed broadband connection on people’s use of the Internet and the services it provides. We use a three-fold definition of deep rural, shallow rural, and urban areas to explore the nature of the digital divides between these areas, and t...

The Digital Economy (DE) has opened up new opportunities for societal wellbeing across many domains of life. Businesses and government in the UK and elsewhere are seeking to capitalize upon these opportunities in terms of reduced operational costs and improved services. However, a sizeable minority of the UK population lack access to basic DE enabl...

The ourSpaces Virtual Research Environment makes use of Semantic Web technologies to create a platform to support multi-disciplinary research groups. This paper introduces the main semantic components of the system: a framework to capture the provenance of the research process, a collection of services to create and visualise metadata and a policy...

Rural older adults with chronic pain may be physically and socially isolated as their pain makes it difficult to interact with others in and outside the home. For some older adults, their only regular in-person interaction may be with health and social care staff who visit them at home. However, there are concerns that the introduction of healthcar...

A sizeable minority of the UK population lack access to basic digitally-enabled services and therefore do not yet participate in the Digital Economy. There is a growing social and economic gap between those who are connected and those who are not, the 'digitally excluded'. This submission outlines available evidence as to the extent of broadband co...

This paper explores relationships between retirement and migration into and within remote rural areas. Rural areas in the UK are characterised by net population gain, with pre-retirement age migrants being an identifiable sub-group of rural in-migrants. This paper reports findings from a household survey which sought evidence for retirement transit...

This paper aims to contribute to the theorisation of midlife migration into rural areas. Although the factors influencing migration are known to be variable at different stages of a person's life, much less well understood is how migration decisions at different stages of the life course are connected and how post-migration experiences may be influ...

Recent literature suggests that the increasingly blurred relationship between paid employment and retirement facilitates a retirement transition period, a life course stage which may involve a change of residence. The role of pre-retirement mobility in the repopulation of rural areas has, however, received relatively little academic scrutiny from U...

In this demo we present ourSpaces, a Virtual Research Environment designed to support inter-disciplinary research teams. This system has been developed to facilitate collaboration and interaction between researchers by enabling users to create, visualise and manage the provenance of research artefacts and processes.

In this paper, two social scientists and two computing scientists reflect upon five years of collaboration on the PolicyGrid I and II projects (an ESRC-funded Digital Social Research node), undertaking research that seeks to understand the activities of interdisciplinary teams of social, environmental and natural scientists working on policy-relate...

The PolicyGrid project is exploring the role of Grid, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0 technologies to support e-Social Science, with particular emphasis on tools to facilitate evidence-based policy making. In this article, we discuss the challenges associated with construction of a provenance framework to support evidence-based policy assessment. We then...

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study investigating older people's health service provision in remote rural Scotland. Comparing stakeholders' perspectives, contested issues were exposed where community members, service managers and policymakers disagreed. Considering these, led to the proposal that fundamental tensions exist between...

Britain's population is ageing. Income levels are an important element of quality of life in retirement. This paper utilizes income data from the British Household Panel Survey to explore income levels and dynamics amongst older people living in non-rural, accessible rural and remote rural areas. Analysis shows clear geographical variations. Averag...

Formal research training is integral to research degrees in human geography completed in UK higher education institutions today. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has been the driving force behind the formalization of research training. Arguably less well known among the ESRC research training recommendations is the stipulation that p...

Planned villages proliferated in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Scotland. Their development was directly related to the social and economic era often referred to as the Enlightenment. This article examines the functional characteristics of these planned villages. It presents a case study of southwest Scotland, where villages with a diverse range...

Public preferences for conservation and environmental management may be identified in willingness to pay (WTP) studies. Normally part of a contingent valuation exercise, WTP studies elicit monetary estimates of non-market economic goods. This paper describes a new approach to WTP, the CV Market Stall, a technique that adds a discursive, qualitative...

Most studies of living conditions in rural areas have offered essentially static snapshots. Social exclusion is a multi-dimensional, dynamic concept which emphasizes the processes of change through which individuals or groups are excluded from the mainstream of society and their life-chances reduced. This article considers social exclusion in the c...

Planned villages erected in the Scottish countryside in the 18th and 19th centuries did much to create the settlement structure of rural Scotland today. South‐west Scotland was affected by this movement as much as other regions of Scotland. This paper demonstrates the importance of the planned village movement to Dumfries and Galloway by ascertaini...

Wild geese graze on improved pastures and young cereal crops and hence can cause considerable damage to agriculture, particularly in areas close to roosting sites. This study uses contingent valuation (CV) to establish whether government compensation payments currently made to farmers represent ‘value for money’ by estimating the value placed on go...

Legislation on the topic of land reform will enter statue during the lifetime of the first administration of the Scottish Parliament. It is thus timely to review types of land ownership that have evolved in Scotland in the recent past. This paper briefly reviews the context of the current land reform debate. It considers the characteristics of comm...

This thesis reports the findings of an empirical research project investigating deprivation in a predominantly rural area of southern Scotland. Many of the social and economic problems afflicting rural communities have been investigated in recent research, and this thesis makes a contribution to this body of work by addressing the relative paucity...

The author addresses the potential of a multiple-methods approach in human geography, an approach to social research which has received little explicit attention in the geographical literature to date. The relationship between epistemology and methodology is outlined, and the similarities and differences between quantitative and qualitative methods...

This paper considers how the concepts of provenance, developed in eScience and argumentation can be applied to eSocial Science, specifically Evidence Based Policy Assessment. Using the Accessibility Policy Assessment Tool as an illustrative example of Evidence Based Policy Assessment, the stages in the Accessibility Policy Assessment Tool are exami...

This paper considers how the concept of data provenance, developed in e-Science, can be applied to e-Social Science, specifically Evidence Based Policy Assessment. It considers what Evidence Based Policy Assessment is and what types of information can be used in such research. Quantitative and qualitative data and analytical/ interpretative approac...

This paper considers how the concept of argumentation, especially from the domain of legal reasoning, can be applied to eSocial Science, specifically evidence-based decision making. The paper describes our approach to argumentation and the use of provenance information to derive evidence to be used in arguments.

In this paper we describe the TOPS project, which aims to generate digital engagement tools to aid personal and social interaction between older adults and their care providers. TOPS focuses specifically on rural older adults who experience chronic pain – this responds to research priorities and to gaps identified in the health, social and technolo...