such as customer demographics for a business in a city or emergency responders at a regional level. The study area of natural scientists may scale from an individual habitat or ecosystem all the way to global effects of climate change, whereas social scientists may focus on communities or places defined by political boundaries, such as states, provinces, or sometimes even countries. Almost everything has a spatial component—it’s just a matter of identifying what that is and determining how it relates to your research question.
GIS is a powerful technology and has much to offer. Like any new tool you encounter, GIS must be handled with care so as not to misuse it. But with a little patience and practice, GIS can serve you well and provide a new set of capabilities that would otherwise be missing from your analytical repertoire.
Spatial thinking
Spatial thinking is the application of geographic principles, such as place, time, and distance. People travel to different places every day. Accomplishing daily tasks requires interacting with spaces, people, and places over a certain period of time. Some of these places are a part of our daily patterns of mobility (such as getting coffee or going to the gym before work), which we could say are a part of our “home range”; other paths we choose to travel may involve going to a new location or place. Home range is a term commonly used to describe animal mobility patterns in the wild, but we humans all have a home range, too. Think about your own daily patterns of mobility and the different places that you visit throughout the course of the day; these would compose your home range. If you were to chart these data points using GIS, you would actually be able to see the spatial patterns of your own home range. Thinking spatially for research methods means being able to conceptualize a research question in light of place, distance, and time.
Spatial thinking is an approach that often has been used by people in environmental resource management, forestry, business marketing, the health field, and social services to accomplish their jobs in a more strategic, efficient, and targeted geographic manner. GIS provides the ability to use a variety of data in a holistic and spatial manner. Any organization, agency, or business can be more efficient and save resources by using a spatial perspective to locate their user needs and existing resources. From a business perspective, this might include locating a business’s markets and supply chains.
Everything exists in time and space and is a certain distance from somewhere. In the research world, the science of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data has often involved a spatial component, even if it was not formally recognized and incorporated into the research process, such as in collecting survey responses. Information regarding location may have been collected as a part of research, but most likely was not used in the most efficient manner. The difference now is that, with GIS software, it is becoming increasingly easy, for example, to map out a variety of responses to survey questions and identify patterns.
Space and place
A researcher can begin to understand a particular issue or problem by asking questions, reading the local newspaper, observing the community, or employing all of these methods while tying in a spatial perspective. Space can be thought of as the distance between places. What is place? Place can be thought of as “meaningful location” (Creswell 2004). In other words, place is a location that has some importance. This importance can vary by individual or by group. When you think about the way that different geographies are named by different groups, this makes sense. For example, many Native Americans and the US government refer to the famous battle fought between General Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho in different ways: many Native Americans refer to it as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, whereas those of nonnative descent refer to it more often as the Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand. For the Native Americans who participated in the battle, it was a clear victory; for the losing side, the US Army, the battle was conceptualized as a great loss. Perhaps this explains why, for many years, many referred to the site as the “Custer Battlefield.” Place-names clearly depend on the group who is doing the naming. To be named and/or defined as a place, a location has to have some meaning.
Places can either be conceptual or real. An example of conceptual space is social status or hierarchy. You could be neighbors with someone in a different class or social circle than you, which may mean you have little to no interaction with the person. Real, physical space is easier to measure than conceptual space because it is more easily defined and demarcated as distances and directions between locations.
Spatial analysis
Spatial analysis explores the relationships within and between data in space and provides the ability to define the common geographies and their characteristics as they relate to other information that has been collected. It is common for spatial thinking to be informed through our direct experience and knowledge of a local environment or place. When you find your way around town to various locations, you are using informal spatial analysis. When you thoughtfully and methodically assess spatial data to determine patterns, you are using formal spatial analysis. GIS facilitates spatial analysis.
Although GIS is a relatively new tool, the concept of conducting a geographically based spatial analysis of social issues is fairly old. Past researchers from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, forestry, public health, history, biology, political science, urban planning, geography, economics, and sociology, have incorporated spatial analysis into their research projects.
Historic examples
The geographically based spatial approach was used prior to the existence of computers and GIS software. In the following sections, we highlight just a few of these historic studies as examples.
Spatial thinking and social inequality in Chicago slums
Florence Kelly was an applied researcher, a women’s rights activist, a child labor law advocate, and one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Kelly believed the power of research could help improve conditions in society. To this end, in 1893, Kelly used laborious geographic analysis, without a computer, to map the “Slums of the Great Cities Survey Maps” (figures 1.8 and 1.9). Kelly, a resident of Chicago’s famous Hull House, led a federally funded study to identify poverty in urban areas (Brown 2004). Hull House, run by Jane Addams, provided aid and social organizational skills to Chicago’s poor. Kelly’s study involved interviewing all of the residents who lived near Hull House in Chicago to find out whether they lived in tenements, rented rooms, or owned homes (Addams 1895).
Figure 1.8 Among the Hull House Settlement research projects were a series of detailed studies of its neighborhoods. These settlements were home to many recent immigrants to Chicago. The majority of these individuals emigrated from central, southern, and eastern Europe. This map originally appeared in “Hull-House Maps and Papers” and shows the nationalities of residents of the neighborhoods bordered by Polk, Twelfth, Halsted, and Jefferson Streets. Hull House Map (Nationalities), 1895, Northwestern University.
Figure 1.9 Rear houses near the West Side area, off an alley near Hull House, circa 1910. Courtesy of University of Illinois at Chicago Jane Addams Memorial Collection, JAMC neg. 1054.
A very important aspect of Kelly’s study was that she recorded the