SOC 261, Spring 2005
Spatial Thinking in Social Science

Course Outline

Monday 12-2 Maxcy 108
Wednesday 2-5 CIS 265

Dr. Logan’s office hours are Monday 3-5 or by appointment.

This course will review ways in which social scientists have incorporated concepts about space, place, and distance into their theories and research.  Examples will be drawn from many substantive areas, including the spatial organization of communities (immigrant neighborhoods and ethnic economies), spatial inequalities (health disparities, criminal victimization and school segregation), and mobility.  Although this is not primarily a methodology course, separate laboratory meetings will offer hands-on application of methods of spatial analysis encountered in the course readings, including an introduction to GIS and related mapping tools.

Monday class meetings will be organized mainly around the course readings.  These classes will operate as a seminar in which every reading is introduced orally by one student (who will also prepare 1-2 page written summaries for distribution).  There will be two essays assigned during the semester.  These will be due on February 28 and May 16.  

Wednesday class meetings will be labs, presented mostly by Charles Zhang and Naresh Kumar.  These will introduce techniques of reading and interpreting maps (with a browser), making maps (with ArcView), and doing spatial analyses (with Geoda).  You will earn a grade for the labs based on attendance and participation, and this grade will count the same as one of the essays.

There is one textbook (Michael Goodchild and Donald Janelle, 2004. Spatially Integrated Social Science.  Oxford University Press).  Other readings are articles available on-line through the Brown University library.  The schedule of readings is as follows:

1/31  Spatial aspects of social networks

Barry Wellman.  2001.  “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25: 227-252.

Munroe Eagles, Paul Belanger, and Hugh Calkins.  “The Spatial Structure of Urban Political Discussion Networks”  SISS, Chapter 10.

2/7  Spaces and places

Janet Kodras and Irene Padavic.  1993.  “Economic Restructuring and Women's Sectoral Employment in the 1970s: A Spatial Investigation across 380 U.S. Labor Market Areas”  Social Science Quarterly 74: 1-27.

Wendy Schiller. 1999. "Trade Politics in the American Congress: A Study of the Interaction of Political Geography and Interest Group Behavior." Political Geography 18: 769-789.

2/14  Access and distance

Scott Allard and Sheldon Danziger.  2003.  “Proximity and Opportunity: How Residence and Race Affect the Employment of Welfare Recipients”  Housing Policy Debate 13: 675-700.

Qing Shen.  “Updating Spatial Perspectives and Analytical Frameworks in Urban Research”  SISS, Chapter 13.

2/21  No class, Presidents Week

2/28  Issues of environmental equity

Manuel Pastor, J. Sadd, and Rachel Morello-Frosch. 2002.  “Who’s Minding the Kids?  Toxic Air, Public Schools, and Environmental Justice in Los Angeles.” Social Science Quarterly 83: 263-280.

John C. Pine, Brian D. Marx, Aruna Lakshmanan.  2002.  “An Examination of Accidental-Release Scenarios from Chemical-Processing Sites: The Relation of Race to Distance”  Social Science Quarterly 83: 317-331.

3/7  Analyzing spatial clusters

John R. Logan and Wenquan Zhang.  “Identifying Ethnic Neighborhoods with Census Data: Group Concentration and Spatial Clustering”  SISS, Chapter 6.

Steven Messner and Luc Anselin.  “Spatial Analyses of Homicide with Areal Data”  SISS, Chapter 7.

3/14  Mobility to work

Victoria Bloomfield and Richard Harris. 1997.  “The Journey to Work”  Historical Methods 30:97-110.

Samuel Cohn and Mark Fossett.  1996.. “What Spatial Mismatch? The Proximity of Blacks to Employment in Boston and Houston” Social Forces,  75, 2, Dec, 557-572.

3/21  Locating economic activities

Mark Ellis, Richard Wright and Virginia Parks.  2004.  “Work Together, Live Apart? Geographies of Racial and Ethnic Segregation at Home and at Work”  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94: 620-637.

Stuart Sweeney and Edward Feser.  “Business Location and Spatial Externalities: Tying Concepts to Measures”  SISS, Chapter 12.

3/28  No class, spring recess

4/4  Exposure to crime

Robert J. Bursik,  Jr. and Jim Webb.  1982.  “Community Change and Patterns of Delinquency” American Journal of Sociology 88: 24-42.

Richard D. Alba, John R. Logan and Paul Bellair.  1994.  "Living with Crime: The Implications of Racial and Ethnic Differences in Suburban Location" Social Forces 73 (December): 395-434.

4/11  Diffusion of urban disorder

Robert Sampson and Jeffrey Morenoff.  “Spatial (Dis)Advantage and Homicide in Chicago Neighborhoods”  SISS, Chapter 8.

4/18  Diffusion over space and time

George Tita and Jacqueline Cohen.  “Measuring Spatial Diffusion of Shots Fired Activity across City Neighborhoods” SISS, Chapter 9.

4/25  Multilevel models: birthweight

Jeffrey Morenoff.  2003. “Neighborhood Mechanisms and the Spatial Dynamics of Birthweight”  American Journal of Sociology 108: 976-1017.

5/2  Multilevel models: collective efficacy

Robert Sampson, Jeffrey Morenoff, and Felton Earls.  1999. “Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children” American Sociological Review 64: 633-660.

5/9  Spatial information overload?

Bruce Boucek and Emilio Moran.  “Inferring the Behavior of Households from Remotely Sensed Changes in Land Cover”  SISS, Chapter 2.

Mei-Po Kwan and Jiyeong Lee.  “Geovisualization of Human Activity Patterns Using 3D GIS”  SISS, Chapter 3.

 
Lab Instructors
Charles Zhang (Charles_Zhang@Brown.edu)
Naresh Kumar (Naresh_Kumar@brown.edu)

Wednesday 2-5 CIS 265

(Preliminary Schedule)
SOC 261 -- Lab Meetings

Preparation:  In order to have access to shape files you will need for some of the lab exercises, during the first week of class please register at http://www.proximityone.com.  You will receive a user id and password via email which will allow you to download shape files from this website. Be sure to save this email and know your user id and password because you will be downloading these files during lab hours.

1/26 Presentation – Some Great Maps and How to Use Them

2/2  Getting to Know Maps with Map New York (http://www.s4.brown.edu)

2/9  Making Your Own Maps of Social Indicators Using the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder (http://factfinder.census.gov)

2/16 Making a Map with ArcView GIS -- Part I
•    Getting around in ArcView
•    Downloading a boundary shape file
•    Creating new data columns
•    Joining in a data table

2/23 Making a Map with ArcView GIS – Part II
•    Looking at the distribution of the data to determine cut-off points for the legend
•    Creating a thematic map – Legends, colors, views, layouts

3/2 Geocoding in ArcView – Mapping Street Addresses for Point Pattern Analysis

3/9  Creating Distance Buffers in ArcView for Spatial Analysis

3/16 Introduction to Geoda (http://sal.agecon.uiuc.edu/geoda_main.php)
•    Getting around Geoda
•    Linking Geoda and ArcView

3/23 Constructing Spatial Weights from ArcView Shape Files
•    Creating rook and queen contiguity weights based on ArcView shape files
•    Characteristics of spatial weights
•    Formats for spatial weights in Geoda

3/30  No class spring recess

4/6   Local Moran’s I and Analysis of Significance Maps
•    Calculating Moran’s I in Geoda
•    Interpreting the data output
•    Joining the data to ArcView and creating a significance map
•    Using the data output to make maps independent of Geoda

4/13  Spatial Weights and Spatial Lags
•    Row-Standardization of Spatial Weights
•    Higher Order Contiguity Weights
•    Constructing Spatial Lags
•    Spatial Lag Bar Charts in ArcView

4/20  Spatial Regression Basics
•    Regression problem files
•    Standard OLS output
•    Diagnostics for spatial effects

4/27  Estimation of the Spatial Lag Model
•    Spatial error
•    Spatial lag and heteroskedasticity