ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes how representative the old people and volunteers were of old people and volunteers in Task Force as a whole. It examines ways of measuring the need for social visiting, as a preliminary to assessing the success of Task Force volunteers. The sample used in the longitudinal survey was a small one including no more than about 4 per cent of the old people Task Force claimed to be visiting at the time. Acomparison of background characteristics and attitudes shows that on most factors the old people in the longitudinal survey and the ‘large’ sample resembled each other very closely. Friends and neighbours do provide a much more extensive network of regular contacts. The simplest way to define the need of old people for social visiting might appear to be in terms of their self-rated loneliness: if a person feels very much alone then surely he needs a visitor more than someone who says he is never lonely.
