GIS and Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences

Policies and Planning (GIS and Spatial Analysis) Part 1

Mapping and GIS have become powerful and useful tools in law enforcement and policing. Basic maps like the pin and thematic maps you learned to make in Section 1 were used in a pioneering way by the New York City Police Department starting in the mid-1990s—each precinct was able to map the crimes that occurred […]

Policies and Planning (GIS and Spatial Analysis) Part 2

Education and Planning for Disasters Recently, Hurricane Katrina in the United States caused great social upheaval for the areas immediately affected as well as the rest of the country. Hurricane Kat-rina took place in August 2005 and directly impacted the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Media images of the affected areas demonstrated the catastrophic […]

Policies and Planning (GIS and Spatial Analysis) Part 3

Health and World Affairs Example: HIV and Armed National Rivalries In the first example in this section we looked at armed conflicts or rivalries between countries, and one of the findings was that there were several hot spots of these conflicts in Africa, mostly about territory and borders. Africa is also the continent which has […]

Policies and Planning (GIS and Spatial Analysis) Part 4

Educational Policy and Educational Outcomes Example: California Education System The state of California recently implemented a system of mandatory exit examinations for high school students. The logic behind the mandatory exams is accountability on the part of school administrators and teachers as well as students in the public school system. Students are given several opportunities […]

Geospatial Modeling and GIS

Geospatial Modeling and GIS This section is different in nature and purpose than the previous two, which were designed to introduce, at the most basic level especially in Section 1, social science students and researchers from sociology, criminology, political science, economics, public health, and other social and behavioral sciences to GIS and map making for […]

The Meaning of Space in Causal Modeling (GIS and Spatial Analysis)

There are two major conceptual ways to understand the impact of space on social and behavioral processes. The first is the idea that the nature of the space itself has a direct influence on the type, nature, scope, frequency, and repetitiveness of the behavior in question. This kind of argument has been advocated for sometime […]

Measuring the Impact of Space and Spatial Relationships

The basic statistic used to measure relationships among variables in space is the same as that used in general to measure relationships—the familiar correlation coefficient, or Pearson’s r—a statistic that varies between +1.0 and -1.0, which measures the degree of linear association between the distribution of cases on one variable and the distribution of another […]

Statistical Issues in Spatial Modeling

The nature of spatial data makes it very likely that the spatial patterning in the dependent variable you are interested in will remain after the influence of the other variables has been accounted for. To understand why this is, recall the discussion in Section 2 about tessellations and spatial clustering, and the arbitrary nature of […]

The Impact of Spatial Autocorrelations and Error Structures in Spatial Modeling

If you find you still have significant spatial autocorrelation in your residuals after including all the variables in your model that you and your theoretical framework think you should include, you cannot use the results from your model; these results will be biased, and in a predictable way. Specifically, in the presence of unaccounted for […]

Statistical Modeling of Spatial Data

The basic model for the approach taken here to geospatial modeling is the spatial regression model. Figure 3.8 shows the three steps in the model. Equation 1 is the basic regression model. Equation 2 shows the way in which the spatial nature of our data is incorporated into the model. The error term vector of […]

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