GIS support to develop a research proposal

In order to be able to analyze research findings spatially or geographically, data needs to be in the correct format. It is therefore important to conceptualize at the beginning of the research, how the data will be analyzed. In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the applications of spatial concepts and techniques in the social sciences (Voss 2007). The development has been especially intense among those researchers who are used to working with data that are aggregated for a territorial unit (a county, city, or neighbourhood). It is a natural step to take advantage of the Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies that make it relatively easy to map those data. More important, visualizing information on a map tends to bring up other questions about how to understand the patterns. At this point, GIS gives way to a myriad of tools of spatial analysis that are well established in geography and in some applied fields such as biostatistics, but that many social scientists are not yet familiar with it.

The techniques that geographers use in their work are not developed in a vacuum. They are developed to address specific problems and, thus, reflect the focus of the discipline at times. These techniques reflect the conscious decisions of geographers about the kinds of information that are important to collect; the spatial scales at which information should be collected, compiled, analysed and displayed; data sampling strategies and experimental designs; data representation; and methods for data analysis.

The Table below shows the steps in the GIS proposal development process.