So I am in the last phase of my thesis, getting ready to send out 2000 surveys, 1000 each to the homes in two different clusters of Albuquerque. While I am only looking at two areas, I have to send out so many because probably only 10-15% will respond. It is quite a bureaucratic and time consuming headache to do this. First I had to get Internal Review Board (IRB) approval which required a mountain paperwork, an online course, and three weeks of waiting. This approval is required for anybody doing a study involving human subjects as a way to insure against possible exploitation. Now I am getting the bulk mailing worked out with the UNM campus mail. I will provide them with the materials (2000 surveys, 2000 consent forms, 2000 10" envelopes), and they will put together the smaller, business reply mail pre-paid envelopes that the responds will use to mail back their surveys. They will also sort and stuff all of the large envelopes and send them out. It will take about two weeks to get all of the details sorted and all of surveys ready to be mailed. Finally, It will probably take about 3 weeks to get all the surveys back.
I am saying all this because I am getting impatient. I want to finish my thesis, graduate, and get on with my life. While sometimes I wish that I didn't go the survey route, I think that in the end it will pay off. I decided to do it because it is rare in the literature to see an analysis that uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis. I am interested in a personal and descriptive analysis to complement all the data that has been processed
The goal of my thesis is to identify neighborhoods in Bernalillo County that lack provision of healthy (primarily meaning access to fruits and vegetables) and relatively cheap food. The quantitative side of the analysis involves two things. The first is to determine personal distance, meaning in this case the average network distance (aggregated on a block group scale) of people to various types of food retailers. Block groups are ranked based upon the aggregate median distance to supermarkets, grocery stores, specialty shops, etc. The second is to determine personal mobility, meaning the ability of people to get to these food retailers in a reasonable amount of time. While there is no index to do this directly, It can be inferred based upon a set of demographic and spatial characteristics, such as car ownership, distance to a bus network, unemployment, disability, poverty, education, etc. Finally, personal distance and personal mobility are compared to rank personal accessibility and possibly identify "food deserts" (areas where people clearly lack accessibility and risk facing health risks in consequence).
I have identified two clusters that could be construed as "food deserts" based upon my analysis. While they have equally dismal personal mobility characteristics, they are different in that one has decent access to supermarkets, but not grocery stores, and the other visa-versa. The purpose of the surveys is to determine if the people's perception of personal food accessibility confirms my methodology and results. In the literature, most people assume that supermarkets are the only real source of healthy and cheap food. I want to see if that is true based upon peoples perceptions.
I am hoping that this analysis will help to better target "food deserts" in Bernalillo County so that businesses and non-profits can better serve these areas. There is a push in many parts of the country to encourage local agriculture in urban areas that lack it. There are also other endeavors, such as food on wheels, which takes healthy food on mobile carts directly to the areas that are lacking.
I am also hoping that I have made a contribution to the spatial accessibility and food accessibility literature by improving upon some methodology. In addition to paring qualitative analysis with quantitative, there are some other methods that I feel are somewhat original.
1) Frequently I see people walking, carrying bags of food. For this reason I set up the network to account for the fact that many people do not own vehicles. bike paths and arroyos were included with rodes as plausible walking routes.
2) Network analysis is a way to calculate the distance from one point to another along a given network. In order to make distance information comparable to census data, it must be aggregated to a census scale, such as a block group. Researchers often estimate the distance of a population from the geometric center of a block group to the nearest facility. The problem with this (in addition to the fact that the resolution is bad) is that the population is not homogeneously distributed through each block group. The geometric center is therefore often a poor measure of average distance. What I did is to find the distance from every residential address point to the nearest food store, and then take the median of those distances within the block group. While the measure is still not perfect it better accounts for heterogeneous population distributions.
3.) Most of the literature assumes that supermarkets are the only source of food. It is widely known that local neighborhood shops are more expensive and have less selection, but they should not be neglected in the analysis. Farmers markets should also be considered, since they are tied to local agriculture and cultural traditions. That is one reason why in my surveys I want to compare people's perception of food provision in different kind of food environments.
This thesis has taken longer than I hoped, and has required more work than I would have liked. There have been many setbacks. At one point my hard drive was stolen containing weeks worth of work. A few times I have realized that something was done wrong a few steps back in a work-flow process, causing me to have to redo the entire process. On the other hand I have learned more doing this than I could have by taking any class. In classes, the data is already clean and the methodology is taught to you. In this I had to find new ways of doing things and work around intractible problems. It has been quite the experience
I am saying all this because I am getting impatient. I want to finish my thesis, graduate, and get on with my life. While sometimes I wish that I didn't go the survey route, I think that in the end it will pay off. I decided to do it because it is rare in the literature to see an analysis that uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis. I am interested in a personal and descriptive analysis to complement all the data that has been processed
The goal of my thesis is to identify neighborhoods in Bernalillo County that lack provision of healthy (primarily meaning access to fruits and vegetables) and relatively cheap food. The quantitative side of the analysis involves two things. The first is to determine personal distance, meaning in this case the average network distance (aggregated on a block group scale) of people to various types of food retailers. Block groups are ranked based upon the aggregate median distance to supermarkets, grocery stores, specialty shops, etc. The second is to determine personal mobility, meaning the ability of people to get to these food retailers in a reasonable amount of time. While there is no index to do this directly, It can be inferred based upon a set of demographic and spatial characteristics, such as car ownership, distance to a bus network, unemployment, disability, poverty, education, etc. Finally, personal distance and personal mobility are compared to rank personal accessibility and possibly identify "food deserts" (areas where people clearly lack accessibility and risk facing health risks in consequence).
I have identified two clusters that could be construed as "food deserts" based upon my analysis. While they have equally dismal personal mobility characteristics, they are different in that one has decent access to supermarkets, but not grocery stores, and the other visa-versa. The purpose of the surveys is to determine if the people's perception of personal food accessibility confirms my methodology and results. In the literature, most people assume that supermarkets are the only real source of healthy and cheap food. I want to see if that is true based upon peoples perceptions.
I am hoping that this analysis will help to better target "food deserts" in Bernalillo County so that businesses and non-profits can better serve these areas. There is a push in many parts of the country to encourage local agriculture in urban areas that lack it. There are also other endeavors, such as food on wheels, which takes healthy food on mobile carts directly to the areas that are lacking.
I am also hoping that I have made a contribution to the spatial accessibility and food accessibility literature by improving upon some methodology. In addition to paring qualitative analysis with quantitative, there are some other methods that I feel are somewhat original.
1) Frequently I see people walking, carrying bags of food. For this reason I set up the network to account for the fact that many people do not own vehicles. bike paths and arroyos were included with rodes as plausible walking routes.
2) Network analysis is a way to calculate the distance from one point to another along a given network. In order to make distance information comparable to census data, it must be aggregated to a census scale, such as a block group. Researchers often estimate the distance of a population from the geometric center of a block group to the nearest facility. The problem with this (in addition to the fact that the resolution is bad) is that the population is not homogeneously distributed through each block group. The geometric center is therefore often a poor measure of average distance. What I did is to find the distance from every residential address point to the nearest food store, and then take the median of those distances within the block group. While the measure is still not perfect it better accounts for heterogeneous population distributions.
3.) Most of the literature assumes that supermarkets are the only source of food. It is widely known that local neighborhood shops are more expensive and have less selection, but they should not be neglected in the analysis. Farmers markets should also be considered, since they are tied to local agriculture and cultural traditions. That is one reason why in my surveys I want to compare people's perception of food provision in different kind of food environments.
This thesis has taken longer than I hoped, and has required more work than I would have liked. There have been many setbacks. At one point my hard drive was stolen containing weeks worth of work. A few times I have realized that something was done wrong a few steps back in a work-flow process, causing me to have to redo the entire process. On the other hand I have learned more doing this than I could have by taking any class. In classes, the data is already clean and the methodology is taught to you. In this I had to find new ways of doing things and work around intractible problems. It has been quite the experience
2 comments:
its good to write these things down because they help you look at where you are with your work with a somewhat outside perspective....
Dude, you've poured a lot of time and effort into this - I don't know if I would have had the patience to do a thesis even if I'd decided on trying one. I gotta say I have a lot of respect for your dedication and commitment. I'm looking forward to hearing the results.
Post a Comment