Spatially Integrated Social Science

Concepts

Spatial association links information sets, social processes, and problems to geographic coordinates and regions. For example, maps of environmental quality and human health can be overlaid to examine correlations that may suggest clues for further research. Spatial associations among diverse phenomena provide bases for hypothesis testing and for inferential analysis in the social sciences. The mapping of residuals from the expected values from regression models is a standard approach for identifying explanatory factors to enhance the understanding of social patterns.

Regional differentiation characterizes the outcomes of processes that distinguish regions and that allocate space to different populations and activities. For instance, the territorial division of cities, based on ethnicity, demographic processes, and social class, plays a significant role in determining social changes and social needs. Similarly, the projection of trends in land use patterns is an important factor in implementing policy measures regarding metropolitan structure and human activity patterns (e.g., commuting and shopping behavior). Geographic information systems play a significant role in monitoring changes in the uses and regional differentiation of space.

Diffusion and spread effects underlie a range of problems at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Public health researchers are concerned with contagion effects in the spread of diseases, and changes in public opinion may reflect social diffusion processes that underlie political movements, shifts in value systems, and changing norms of human behavior. Cartographic visualization of these processes through animated maps represents one method of depicting temporal patterns in the geographic spread of such phenomena.

Spatial interactions refer to movements among places—migrations among nations, traffic flows within cities, commodity flows among regions, and so forth. The analysis and modeling of flows is an important focus for resolving problems in transportation studies, in explaining trade patterns in relationship to regional development issues, and in understanding demographic changes that alter the demand for social services.

Physical arrangement and clustering of phenomena are keys to pattern detection, for example, in identifying the patterns of crime occurrences in cities and in being able to discern whether such patterns arise by chance or through some underlying associations of social and economic conditions that occur within regions and their surrounding areas.

Principles

The primary principles of SISS are integration, spatiotemporal context, spatially explicit modeling, and place-based analysis and interpretation.

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