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GIS
GIS Research Methods: Incorporating Spatial Perspectives Incorporating Spatial Perspectives
RESEARCH
Research Methods can be applied to projects in a range of
social and physical sciences by researchers using GIS for the
Research Design
first time and experienced practitioners looking for new and
innovative research techniques.
Methods
GIS Research
Preface����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xi
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................... xix
3. Research design................................................................................................. 59
What is the purpose of your research?.....................................................................................60
Deductive versus inductive approach to research..................................................................65
Stages of sociospatial research for deductive research...........................................................66
Grounded theory: GIS using an inductive approach............................................................80
Sociospatial grounded theory using GIS.................................................................................82
4. Research ethics and spatial inquiry.................................................................... 91
Research ethics and GIS.............................................................................................................92
Errors caused by analysis.............................................................................................................98
Errors in human inquiry.......................................................................................................... 102
Ecological fallacy....................................................................................................................... 104
Ethics and data collection........................................................................................................105
Ethics and data sharing.............................................................................................................112
Ethics and data storage..............................................................................................................112
Contents ix
12. Spatial analysis of qualitative data .................................................................. 309
Qualitative data and GIS..........................................................................................................310
What are qualitative data?.......................................................................................................310
Spatial qualitative analysis........................................................................................................311
Steps for spatial qualitative analysis........................................................................................316
Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 401
In the more than half-century since geographic information systems (GIS) came into
existence, GIS has grown from a backroom computer analysis tool used by large government
agencies and specialists in a few fields to a widely used tool across almost every discipline
today. Applications of GIS can be seen in diverse fields of inquiry, including business and
economics, health care, emergency management, criminology, and social services, and in
more traditional applications in natural resource management, demographics, and planning.
Since the turn of the millennium, and particularly with the widespread availability of
mapping applications on the Internet, GIS (or, to the lay public, simply computer-based
mapping) has gained broad recognition as a valuable tool for practitioners and researchers in
these, and many other, fields of inquiry.
As GIS software has become more affordable and easier to use, we have witnessed wider
interest in and acceptance of this technology beyond the traditional areas of the natural
sciences. The value of GIS and spatial analysis techniques is expansive and limited only
by the creativity of the people who use it in their own work. Of course, regardless of one’s
field of study, almost all of the data we collect and analyze can be connected to location.
Considering spatial relationships is a very natural and intuitive process. We consider the best
route to drive to our destination; a preferred set of criteria when considering where we want
to live; or why it is that every time we go to certain parts of town, we feel a bit uneasy.
As we wrote this book, GIS training and course work continued to become more widely
available at a variety of levels. Although GIS has long been taught on university campuses,
in the last decade, we have witnessed an expansion of course work and interest in disciplines
that previously may not have considered GIS approaches relevant. Numerous community
colleges, high schools, and even elementary and middle schools now integrate spatial
thinking and GIS into their curricula. Professional organizations and local GIS user groups,
and hack-a-thons, now provide opportunities for active professionals to become familiar
with spatial analysis and related tools relevant to their work.
Although this book introduces the underlying theory and applications of GIS, it is not
intended as a manual for GIS software. If you are already an experienced GIS user, we hope
this book will increase your understanding of the capabilities of GIS and its approaches
in your own research applications. For those just beginning to use GIS, we designed this
book to help you understand how spatial research approaches may strengthen and enhance
the work you are already doing. We address key considerations in planning and carrying
out your own GIS analysis. However, because GIS is an ever-changing technology, it is not
unusual for many of the specific commands, menus, and tools in the software to change
and improve as new versions of the software are released. This typically results in multiple
possible approaches to accomplishing any given task.
With the explosive growth of GIS, numerous books now introduce the technology to
practitioners in specific disciplines, joining countless introductory texts for GIS and specific
software applications. Incorporating GIS into qualitative research is somewhat less
well-charted territory; methods for incorporating GIS have only recently begun to emerge.
What has eluded us is a text specifically addressing the fundamental topics of GIS research
methods. A unique aspect of this book is that we focus specifically on how to integrate GIS
into both qualitative and quantitative research. Our objective in writing this book is to
provide a foundation for GIS research methods and, more specifically, to integrate spatial
thinking and spatial analysis into a research tool with clear methodological techniques. The
book is useful to anyone, from the student, researcher, or practitioner to the consultant,
environmental scientist, city planner, or community leader who wants to establish such a
skill set.
GIS is a continually evolving technology; a wide variety of companies and groups
produce GIS software and tools across a variety of platforms. Clearly a text of this nature
could never begin to cover all possible operations, commands, and capabilities of the
technology. Instead, our goal is to provide readers an introduction to some of the core
concepts and steps necessary to perform GIS-based research, using Esri’s ArcGIS software
as an example. However, it would be incorrect to presume that this book comprehensively
covers everything that is possible with GIS. A high-powered GIS platform, such as ArcGIS,
makes available more concepts and commands than any one person could possibly hope
to master, let alone cover in a single text. We encourage you to explore this text alongside
additional titles and resources, many of which we mention in this book.
Over the years, we have worked and collaborated with people and communities
interested in spatially based research and problem solving. However, we have consistently
found that people who work in fields unfamiliar with GIS grapple with understanding
how spatial analysis methods can be applied to their own work. Integrating GIS into your
own research projects can truly enhance the value of the work in many ways. Namely, GIS
enhances your ability to collect, analyze, and, perhaps most importantly, communicate and
convey the findings of research in a visually accessible manner. The visual outputs of GIS can
effectively cross traditional barriers of culture, language, and literacy.
We encourage you to use this text as a springboard into your exploration of conducting
your research with GIS. Because first conceptualizing a research question is critical to
subsequent data collection, analysis, and output, it is essential for researchers to consider
all aspects of the research process from beginning to end. This book is designed to assist
researchers in the process of conceptualizing space as a part of the research process. We hope
Preface xiii
Chapter 3: Research design
Chapter 3 explores the different purposes of research. It also presents two different
approaches (deductive and inductive) to research design. The chapter includes a
step-by-step process for designing spatial research using either a deductive or inductive
approach and discusses key research concepts such as baseline data. The traditional scientific
method underlies the deductive research approach, and the notion of grounded theory drives
the inductive approach to social research methods.
Preface xv
the risks to data collection security and provides more data collection flexibility. In this
chapter, we highlight the collection of primary, spatially based data via on-site ethnographic
data collection methods, including case studies, oral histories, and participant observations.
In essence, these are all forms of sociospatial documentation.
Preface xvii
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Acknowledgments
First, we would like to thank everyone at Esri Press for assisting us throughout the
development and writing of this book. We would also like to acknowledge our friends and
families—and especially our son Joshua—for their patience on those many days when the
book took priority. Additionally, we want to acknowledge the many communities, research
teams, and students with whom we have worked throughout our careers. All of those people,
places, and experiences have directly informed our writing. Without the opportunity to
develop our thinking about GIS in research with the valuable living laboratory of the
classroom, we would never have had the opportunity to implement, improve, and bring these
concepts together in a coherent fashion. Finally, GIS has played a major role in our personal
lives. It was GIS that initially led to us meeting as new faculty members early in our careers
and, ultimately, to marrying. We regularly refer to this phenomenon as “GIS Love,” and
perhaps in sharing our own passion for GIS here, a little bit of “GIS Love” will come to our
readers, too.
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About the authors
In this chapter, you will learn a new approach to thinking spatially about research
questions and methods. You will explore the following questions: Why think
spatially? What does thinking spatially really mean? Why should I incorporate
spatial analysis into my research methods? You will learn about geographic
information systems (GIS) and how they are used as a component of research.
You will also explore the added value that spatially based research methods bring
to enhance scientific investigation and how GIS research methods fit into an
overall research framework to provide a more complete picture of the topic under
study. This chapter serves as a foundation for later sections of the text.
Learning objectives
• Learn about spatial thinking
• Learn how GIS is useful to various forms of research
• Learn the definitions and relationship between space and place
• Learn about sociospatial, informal, and formal spatial analysis
• Learn the value of a multiple methods approach
• Learn the historic context for spatial thinking
Key concepts
formal spatial analysis place spatial advantage
home range policy spatial analysis
informal spatial analysis sociospatial spatial thinking
multiple methods space
Using spatial knowledge
A headline on a local news website reads, “Westside Mugger Caught!” Given that you work
on the Westside, you feel a great sense of relief as you begin to read the article. The past few
weeks have seen a rash of muggings; every couple of days, another victim was attacked, and it
seemed as though the assailant was a step ahead of the police. You have always wondered how
the police catch up with criminals, and as you read the story, you come across a sentence that
piques your interest: “We never would have caught the person behind these attacks without
our new CompStat system,” stated the chief of police. The article goes on to explain that
CompStat is a computer-based analysis system built around crime statistics mapped in GIS.
Interesting. You begin to wonder exactly what the journalist means by mapping crime
statistics. How would that help catch a criminal? You have always found maps to be
interesting, and they certainly help you find your way when traveling. You have even heard
about those maps to movie stars’ homes you can buy in Hollywood, but you don’t recall ever
seeing a map to criminals’ homes (figure 1.1).
It turns out that the GIS behind CompStat wasn’t exactly used to find the home of the
criminal, but almost. The police took advantage of a variety of basic information, or data,
about the area in which the crimes were occurring (figure 1.2), along with information about
the locations of each of the muggings as they were reported. As the locations of the crimes
were mapped, some interesting patterns began to develop.
Figure 1.1 An example of a publicly available crime map from the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California.
This web-mapping site integrates crime data from police departments around the country and is powered by the
Esri ArcGIS for Server. Courtesy of the Omega Group, San Diego, CA. Basemap data from Esri, HERE, DeLorme, IPC,
METI/NASA, USGS, EPA.