报告题目：Uncertain Geographic Context Problem 

报 告 人：Professor Mei-Po Kwan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

报告摘要： 

The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) is a fundamental issue much of geographic and social science research has faced. Studies that examine the effects of area-based attributes on individual behaviors or outcomes also face another fundamental methodological problem. This is the problem that findings about the effects of area-based attributes may be affected by how contextual units (e.g., neighborhoods) are geographically delineated and the extent to which these areal units deviate from the “true causally relevant” geographic context. I recently articulated this problem as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP), which is also a significant methodological problem because it means that analytical results can be different for different delineations of contextual units even if everything else is the same. I have also emphasized that the UGCoP is a problem as fundamental as the MAUP for any study that uses area-based contextual attributes, but is a different kind of problem because it is not due to the use of different zonal schemes or spatial scales for area-based variables. In this presentation I discuss the nature and sources of the UGCoP. Using recent studies on neighborhood effects and environmental health as examples, I explore how geospatial technologies and GIS-based methods can help mitigate the problem in geographic research.

 http://meipokwan.org. 

报告人简介：

Mei-Po Kwan is Professor of GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois，USA). She has received various prestigious research awards from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2011. Kwan is currently Editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. She has received grants totaling about US$22 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She has made outstanding contributions to spatial analysis. More information:

主持人：王劲峰  研究员 

时    间：2014年10月9日（星期四）16:00-17:30

地    点：中科院地理资源所2321会议室

主办单位：资源与环境信息系统国家重点实验室