Data in Action: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences (Workshop)
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Data in Action: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences
Workshop: November 20-21 (in person)
Schedule of Events:
Seminar: Thursday, Nov. 20, noon-1pm (lunch provided)
Thursday, Nov. 20, 2-5pm
Friday, Nov. 21, 9am-noon
Friday, Nov. 21, noon: lunch
Friday, Nov. 21, 2-5pm
Presenter:
Kate Anderson, University of Houston
Co-Sponsored by:
The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI)
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The Texas Federal Statistical Data Research Center (TXRDC)
Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences
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Geographic information science is the scientific use and study of methods and tools for the capture, storage, distribution, analysis, display, and exploitation of geocoded information. Most often, we see this application in the physical and environmental sciences. However, these tools can also be readily employed to study human behavior that occurs in physical spaces. In particular, most Census and government datasets contain geographic information of some sort and can be analyzed spatially as well. In this workshop, we will cover basic mapping applications, as well as the basics of how to conduct data management with geocoded datasets, or datasets that contain geographic coordinates. We will also cover spatial analysis and regression techniques. This is important because most of the regression models used in the social sciences assume independence of observations (or no autocorrelation), which is usually not possible with spatially referenced data. We typically assume that places that are near to one another exert influence over one another. We will learn how to test for spatial autocorrelation and conduct two spatial regression models: the spatial lag model and the spatial error model. We will use the user-friendly open-source applications GeoDa and GeoDa Space to conduct this work.
RSVP for Seminar and Workshop HERE
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Bio:
Kathryn Freeman Anderson is an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of Houston. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Arizona in 2016. The key theme of her research investigates how social contexts impact individual-level well-being. More specifically, she focuses on how several contextual environments, such as neighborhoods, race relations, inequality, and organizations, shape the health of the individuals embedded within these various arenas. Her research bridges the substantive areas of population health, urban sociology, and racial/ethnic relations while utilizing a number of methodological approaches, chiefly quantitative methods, spatial analytic techniques, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). |