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Welfare, Children, and Families:  A Three-City Study

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The GIA Core's earliest contribution to the project has been the development of a coding process database.  This database will help the Penn State team to track our progress in coding the vast amount of material coming from the family ethnographers.  A data entry form will allow coders to track the following important information:

•     has the file been transferred to the local machine and decrypted?
•     is the file readable?
•     has the file been imported to the coding software?
•     who did the coding and when was the coding completed?

The form has numerous drop-down lists and fill-in-as-you-type features that will improve not only the speed of data entry, but also the accuracy of the information entered.  The real power of the database will be the ability to query it quickly for certain important kinds of information.  Here are just some of the questions that may be answered once the database is operational:

• which files haven't been coded?
• which files need to be re-sent?
• which files did Frank code in January, 2000?
• which files are associated with family 01 in Boston?
• which files are associated with Latino families in Chicago?
• which files are associated with ethnographer X?

This contribution to the Tri-cities Project is a good example of the GIA Core providing a service that is more IS in nature than G.

At this early stage in the project, the GIA Core has done only basic preparatory neighborhood mapping for the three cities.  However, at the October project meeting Stephen Matthews presented a number of ways that we could contribute to the project.  Here are a few excerpts from that presentation:

The map to the right was developed as an illustration to help researchers better understand the complexity of someone's everyday life. The idea is based on the time-space path followed by an individual in a typical day (How does an individual navigate the urban landscape? What neighborhood services/resources do they use? What spatial constraints are there on an individuals mobility around the city?).

All geographical objects that may be of interest to our Tri-City Welfare Study can be classified as Points (e.g., households, day-care, clinics, schools, crimes, graffiti, etc.), Lines (e.g., roads, railway, pathways, walking routes, bus routes, etc.) or Areas (Polygons) (e.g., census unit, zipcode, school district, police precinct, etc.) and incorporated into a GIS. All objects in a GIS are defined in terms of:  a) their geographic location and dimension  b) their attributes  c) topological relationships

The diagrams to the left help illustrate the value of being able to link locational data to attribute data for specific geographic features. The examples are based upon secondary health clinic data available over the Internet.

 

The following maps illustrate the way in which new data can be integrated with locational data for San Antonio using a GIS. In the first example to the right, the map shows the distribution of clinics (including those that provide WIC services).
In the map to the right, the GIS has been used to derive a new, hitherto unknown variable - distances from each clinic. This variable can be used to generate a map of the psuedo-availability surface of health and WIC clinics.
In the third map, GIS has been used to integrate data on clinics with data collected for different geographical units (areas). In this example poverty distributions at the zipcode level are presented as a backdrop to the distribution of clinics.
The final map in this sequence demonstrates the ability of GIS to facilitate interactive querying of the attribute data. Such a query can also be specified based on a spatially defined criteria.

Page 2 of Welfare, Children, and Families examples

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