threats to the public.
Figure 3.2 This map shows counties in New York State with mosquitoes confirmed to be carrying the West Nile virus. These data are tracked and updated on a regular basis throughout the year for all US states and territories. Data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Exploration
When a study is exploratory, there may be little known about the topic. The goal of exploratory research is to begin to develop an understanding of the topic so that you can begin to develop additional questions or hypotheses.
Exploratory research is research at the tip of the iceberg. In other words, the researcher is trying out something for the first time. An example of this would be if you lived in a community where there is a shortage of affordable housing. The word on the street might be that only “old people” can afford to live in the nice section of the city anymore. As a researcher who is conducting exploratory research, you could create a GIS map that portrays the age distribution of people in particular areas of the city.
Figure 3.3 presents a map showing the distribution of people aged older than sixty-four. To further investigate the question of whether only the older population is able to afford housing in a particular region, the next step would be to overlay these data of the elderly population with housing prices for the same region. It could be that the elderly population can afford their homes because they bought them a long time ago, when the prices were lower. You might accomplish this by using a GIS and adding US Census population data to the mix.
Figure 3.3 A map of data grouped by census block, by age (older than sixty-four years), from 1990 to 2000, in the Eel River Valley near Fortuna, California. Map courtesy of Sheila Steinberg and Nicholas Ramirez, Humboldt State University/California Center for Rural Policy, with funding by the McLean Foundation, Fortuna, CA. Data from US Census, Esri.
This type of exploratory research would be the starting point for a more in-depth study of housing issues that could be conducted in the future. Exploratory research is an appropriate place to start for the researcher who is becoming familiar with a particular topic or situation. It is also a good place to start for someone who is interested in making an empirical investigation of general knowledge held by members of the community. This provides a way for a researcher to further examine if the word on the street has any validity and, if so, to what degree the information is true.
The exploratory research process can be somewhat challenging, but also exciting, because it occurs early on in the creative investigational process. Figure 3.4 presents an exploratory process that a researcher can follow to take a research question from its conceptual form to a more operational form, where a researcher can specify the particular data he or she is going to examine.
Figure 3.4 Exploratory process for taking a research question from concept to data in preparation for analysis.
Explanation
When explanation is the goal of your research, you are seeking to examine relationships between variables. A researcher conducting an explanatory study is interested in developing a scientifically based understanding of why things happen. Explanatory studies still involve description, but with a different goal in mind. One goal might be to develop an understanding of connections that explain why something occurs in some locations but not in others. How does GIS fit into this? It enables the researcher to consider spatial relationships as one potential component that helps to explain why an observed relationship occurs.
For example, let’s say that you are interested in understanding why crime rates are higher in some neighborhoods than others. Is it due to socioeconomic issues, such as income and education? Are there spatial relationships, such as proximity to ATMs or convenience stores? Or are there negative correlations to locations of police stations, well-lit streets, or other physical factors? As part of your study, you could create a geographic picture of these variables within the areas that experience varied crime rates. The GIS will show you where the different variables intersect with higher or lower crime rates and quite possibly show that certain variable combinations have a stronger correlation with crime than others. To avoid committing the ecological fallacy (see discussion later in this chapter), you might wish to follow up the analysis by conducting interviews or surveys of residents and viewing trends in crime in the context of the national economy and crime in other areas to develop a complete understanding of why these higher crime rates occur in specific types of neighborhoods.
Of course, one must be cautious when using a GIS to avoid the temptation to draw conclusions based solely on appearance. Although visualization of the data is a powerful method for showing relationships, one must be careful to follow this up with sound analysis—be that spatial analysis in the GIS, spatial and nonspatial statistical analyses, or other means appropriate to the data. To help in this process, we provide step-by-step guidance for two different approaches to research: deductive and inductive.
Deductive versus inductive approach to research
A GIS can be useful for both inductive and deductive approaches to research. In a deductive approach, the researcher begins the research process by following a series of traditional steps. In this kind of research, the researcher begins with a review of literature, generates a conceptual framework, develops a hypothesis, and then tests this hypothesis by gathering data. Figure 3.5 visualizes the process involved in the deductive research approach, in which the researcher begins with an examination of the data to generate a theory.
Figure 3.5 The deductive research approach.
By contrast, in an inductive approach, the researcher’s understanding of the research topic and potential hypotheses emerge from the data. In other words, the researcher does not go into the study with any preconceived notions or hypotheses. Instead, the researcher begins the research process by collecting data and then seeks to develop an understanding of patterns observed. This ultimately leads the researcher to develop a theory to help explain the observed patterns. Figure 3.6 portrays the inductive research approach, in which the researcher begins with a theory and then collects and analyzes data to test a hypothesis related to that theory.
Figure 3.6 The inductive research approach.
Stages of sociospatial research for deductive research
In using a deductive research model, researchers have a clear idea or hypothesis that they want to investigate through the research process. We have developed ten steps in the research process, which is a variation of the eight steps associated with the scientific method as mentioned by Henslin (2003):