Mei Po Kwan

Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lecture Title: The Uncertain Geographic Context Problem: Implications for Social Science and Health Research

The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) is a fundamental issue much of social science and health research has faced. Studies that examine the effects of area-based attributes on individual behaviors or outcomes also face another fundamental methodological problem. This is the problem that findings about the effects of area-based attributes may be affected by how contextual units (e.g., neighborhoods) are geographically delineated and the extent to which these areal units deviate from the “true causally relevant” geographic context. I recently articulated this problem as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP), which is also a significant methodological problem because it means that analytical results can be different for different delineations of contextual units even if everything else is the same. I have also emphasized that the UGCoP is a problem as fundamental as the MAUP for any study that uses area-based contextual attributes, but it is a different kind of problem because it is not due to the use of different zonal schemes or spatial scales for area-based variables. In this presentation I discuss the nature and sources of the UGCoP. Using recent studies on neighborhood effects and environmental health as examples, I explore how geospatial technologies and GIS-based methods can help mitigate the problem in social science and health research.