GIS Research Methods. Steven J. Steinberg

       Preface

      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,

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