ABSTRACT
This chapter has drawn on an Age UK Lancashire action research project, Linking Communities, which examined whether the involvement of older people, and others from local communities, would result in a better match between, on the one hand, people’s needs and wants and, on the other, the sorts of facilities and services available to support them in leading fuller lives (Clough et al. 2014). Information was collected in a variety of ways, in particular from two surveys using questionnaires that allowed for open-ended responses with 706 and 190 respondents respectively and from interviews with 90 older people and 45 service providers.
