This book shows how to model the spatial interactions between actors that are at the heart of the social sciences.

This is the first book to provide sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, and other social scientists with the methodological logic and techniques for doing spatial analysis in their chosen fields of inquiry. The book contains a wealth of examples as to why these techniques are worth doing, over and above conventional statistical techniques using SPSS or other statistical packages. GIS is a methodological and conceptual approach that allows for the linking together of spatial data, or data that is based on a physical space, with non-spatial data, which can be thought of as any data that contains no direct reference to physical locations.

Within both the social and environmental sciences, much of the data collected is within a spatial context and requires statistical analysis for interpretation. The purpose of this book is to describe current methods for the analysis of spatial data. Methods described include data description, map interpolation, and exploratory and explanatory analyses. The book also examines spatial referencing, and methods for detecting problems, assessing their seriousness and taking appropriate action are discussed. This is an important text for any discipline requiring a broad overview of current theoretical and applied work for the analysis of spatial data sets. It will be of particular use to research workers and final year undergraduates in the fields of geography, environmental sciences and social sciences.

GIS and the Social Sciences offers a uniquely social science approach on the theory and application of GIS with a range of modern examples. It explores how human geography can engage with a variety of important policy issues through linking together GIS and spatial analysis, and demonstrates the importance of applied GIS and spatial analysis for solving real-world problems in both the public and private sector. The book introduces basic theoretical material from a social science perspective and discusses how data are handled in GIS, what the standard commands within GIS packages are, and what they can offer in terms of spatial analysis. It covers the range of applications for which GIS has been primarily used in the social sciences, offering a global perspective of examples at a range of spatial scales. The book explores the use of GIS in crime, health, education, retail location, urban planning, transport, geodemographics, emergency planning and poverty/income inequalities. It is supplemented with practical activities and datasets that are linked to the content of each chapter and provided on an eResource page. The examples are written using ArcMap to show how the user can access data and put the theory in the textbook to applied use using proprietary GIS software. This book serves as a useful guide to a social science approach to GIS techniques and applications. It provides a range of modern applications of GIS with associated practicals to work through, and demonstrates how researcher and policy makers alike can use GIS to plan services more effectively. It will prove to be of great interest to geographers, as well as the broader social sciences, such as sociology, crime science, health, business and marketing.

This is the first book to provide sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, and other social scientists with the methodological logic and techniques for doing spatial analysis in their chosen fields of inquiry. The book contains a wealth of examples as to why these techniques are worth doing, over and above conventional statistical techniques using SPSS or other statistical packages. GIS is a methodological and conceptual approach that allows for the linking together of spatial data, or data that is based on a physical space, with non-spatial data, which can be thought of as any data that contains no direct reference to physical locations.

Providing an authoritative assessment of the current landscape of spatial analysis in the social sciences, this cutting-edge Handbook covers the full range of standard and emerging methods across the social science domain areas in which these methods are typically applied. Accessible and comprehensive, it expertly answers the key questions regarding the dynamic intersection of spatial analysis and the social sciences.

Spatial analysis assists theoretical understanding and empirical testing in the social sciences, and rapidly expanding applications of geographic information technologies have advanced the spatial data-gathering needed for spatial analysis and model making. This much-needed volume covers outstanding examples of spatial thinking in the social sciences, with each chapter showing some aspect of how certain social processes can be understood by analyzing their spatial context. The audience for this work is as trans-disciplinary as its authorship because it contains approaches and methodologies useful to geography, anthropology, history, political science, economics, criminology, sociology, and statistics.