Lee Chanam, Moudon Anne Vernez, Courbois Jean-Yves Pip
Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station 77843-3137, USA.
Ann Epidemiol. 2006 May;16(5):387-94. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2005.03.003. Epub 2005 Jul 6.
The quality and economy of inferential research rely heavily on the sampling method. This paper addresses a methodological challenge in environment-behavior research: sampling respondents in relation to their built environmental characteristics.
A discussion of issues related to traditional neighborhood-based sampling serves to introduce a new spatial sampling strategy. Spatial sampling consists of defining conceptual population of interest, constructing spatial sample frame using parcel-level environmental data in GIS, examining the sample frame, determining the sampling design and size, and drawing the samples. An application of this method is illustrated using a recent study examining environmental correlates of walking and biking.
Spatial sampling with parcel-level data ensures sufficient variations in and proper distributions of the environmental variables of interest, while controlling for the conditions of no interest. The use of the individual as unit of analysis offers an economic, generalizable, and easily interpretable approach to environment-behavior research, and discourages the potentially erroneous a priori definition of neighborhoods and aggregation problems.
With its capacity to consider a broad range of detailed environmental variables, spatial sampling contributes to finding new or stronger environment-behavior associations and to the growing number of studies using the social ecologic model.
推断性研究的质量和经济性在很大程度上依赖于抽样方法。本文探讨了环境与行为研究中的一个方法学挑战：根据受访者的建成环境特征进行抽样。
对与传统基于邻里的抽样相关的问题进行讨论，以引入一种新的空间抽样策略。空间抽样包括定义感兴趣的概念总体、使用地理信息系统（GIS）中的地块级环境数据构建空间抽样框、检查抽样框、确定抽样设计和规模以及抽取样本。通过一项近期研究展示了该方法的应用，该研究考察了步行和骑自行车的环境相关因素。
使用地块级数据进行空间抽样可确保感兴趣的环境变量有足够的变化和适当的分布，同时控制无关条件。以个体作为分析单位为环境与行为研究提供了一种经济、可推广且易于解释的方法，避免了邻里的潜在错误先验定义和聚集问题。
空间抽样能够考虑广泛的详细环境变量，有助于发现新的或更强的环境与行为关联，并推动越来越多的研究采用社会生态模型。
