Choose a topic.
2. Define the problem.
3. Conduct a literature review.
4. Develop a hypothesis.
5. Develop a conceptual framework.
6. Choose research methods.
7. Collect and prepare the data.
8. Ground truth (verify) the data.
9. Analyze the data.
10. Share the results.
Choose a topic
The first step in conducting your research is to choose a topic. As a researcher, you may already have your topic chosen for you by an employer, an organization, a funding agency, or a foundation that hires you to conduct research. If you are independently choosing your topic, it is a good idea to select a subject or issue that you find personally interesting.
It is a good idea to keep a journal of potential research ideas. In this journal, you could write down research ideas or thoughts as they come to you. Keep a journal like this for a month, and then go back to it and look for themes that may have emerged. By reviewing your thoughts and ideas over an extended time period, you might find that one or two ideas surface along with developed options for further study. Of course, you may also need to consider time limitations. If you are a student, can you complete your study in the course of a semester, or will it be more like a graduate thesis, extending over a longer period of time?
If your project is related to your professional role or position, what is your time frame? Are you working within the confines of a budget or policy cycle? Is there a pressing need that you are trying to address, or is this research going to be used for long-term planning?
It is also good to pick a topic that is feasible to study. For example, you may find a comparison of nontraditional sexual practices around the world to be interesting but may encounter some difficulty collecting primary data on this topic. When evaluating the feasibility of a particular topic, consider what, if any, prior work has been done on the subject. Additionally, you should think about how to locate and collect the data necessary to complete the analysis. You can usually find some existing, relevant data related to your topic. This step is important for assessing feasibility, because you want to avoid doing research in a vacuum, without consulting past research practice, geographic locations where your topic has been studied, and prior research results related to your topic. Once you have determined a topic, you can think about choosing a study site, perhaps something close to home you can visit. To determine how a GIS would fit into your topic, think about which relevant variables can be collected in space and what boundaries of analysis are appropriate to exploring the data.
Define the problem
In defining the problem, you want to think more specifically about how you can narrow your topic. Having a good, solid definition of the problem will focus your research as you proceed with the project. We advise writing out a problem statement that includes the following four components:
1. An introduction to the topic
2. Established relevance or importance by citing the established literature
3. Background on your topic
4. A specific problem related to a particular issue or research hypothesis
To include a GIS in your definition of the problem, you need to think about what units of analysis you are interested in comparing. Are you interested in investigating an issue by looking at different groups who live in different places? Would it be more fitting to examine the same group over time? How you want to investigate your research question—meaning what groups, geographic locations, and issues your study involves—is important to know up front. Once you have determined these issues, you can begin collecting already existing GIS data that relate to your topic or creating data that pertain to your topic, or both.
Conduct a literature review
Conducting a literature review is an essential next step in the academic research process. Even if you are not conducting an academic research project, a review of some of the pertinent literature will help to inform and support the approaches to the topic that other researchers have used, which is important when you need to convince colleagues. The literature review should present relevant information from a variety of literature. A broad review is especially important if you are dealing with an interdisciplinary topic where one source does not adequately address all of the issues you are interested in studying in your analysis. Because GIS-based projects by nature draw on information from a variety of disciplines, a review of several areas of literature may be necessary.
For example, if you are using a GIS to analyze gaps in the public transportation system in a particular community, you will want to examine literature in fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, transportation, and GIS. Such sources might help in your understanding of which people use public transportation and in what ways, how public transportation systems are designed and routed, how GIS is used in modeling systems and behaviors, and perhaps other areas. Figure 3.7 illustrates how GIS can be used to portray public transportation in New York City.
Figure 3.7 A portion of a public transit map for New York City. Analyzing such maps, in conjunction with data on demographics, ridership, crimes, or access to shopping, day care, or other services, could serve as an essential component of many studies. Questions that might be explored would be opportunities to add stops or adjust routes and schedules, increase the visibility of police on the beat, or site new social service agency offices to better serve the target population. Map courtesy of Jake Berman, http://maps.complutense.org. Subway service information courtesy of the MTA. CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Ultimately, by reviewing how others have thought about modeling or analyzing data in a spatial context—even if they never used a GIS—you will be better able to develop an appropriate model to implement in a GIS. (Note that researchers have, for many years, thought about questions spatially. The presentation of Dr. John Snow’s research in London in the mid-1800s is one of the earliest published examples. Although the advent of GIS was more than a century off, the design of Snow’s analysis would be easily carried out in a GIS today. For additional, classic examples of spatial concepts in social sciences, visit the Center for Spatial Integrated Social Science website’s section on classic research at http://www.csiss.org/classics/.)
In writing a literature review, be sure to include a thorough review of the relevant information that pertains to your topic. This involves searching for a variety of sources of relevant information. It is always good to include many types of information in your literature review, ranging from journals to books, news stories, and websites. Check sources and credentials when relying on information from websites because it may not have been vetted for quality and credibility. It is up to you, the researcher, to critically assess the sources of information you find on the web, or anyplace else, before deciding which sources you will use.
When reviewing the literature, try to search for studies conducted on your topic using a GIS. This information may give you ideas about how to incorporate a GIS into your own study. Use the keywords “GIS” or “geographic information systems” when searching for these studies in the literature related to your study. This approach is generally more successful than going to journals focused on GIS and looking for information particular to the discipline you are analyzing; although, sometimes this approach can also yield good resources.
Your literature review should contain common themes and specific,