Engstrom Ryan, Ofiesh Caetlin, Rain David, Jewell Henry, Weeks John
Department of Geography, The George Washington University, 1922 F St. NW Washington DC 20052.
J Maps. 2013 Jan 1;9(1):36-42. doi: 10.1080/17445647.2013.765366.
The neighborhood has been used as a sampling unit for exploring variations in health outcomes. In a variety of studies census tracts or ZIP codes have been used as proxies for neighborhoods because the boundaries are pre-defined units for which other data are readily available. However these spatial units can be arbitrary and do not account for social-cultural behaviors and identities that are significant to residents. In this study for the city of Accra, Ghana, our goal was to create a neighborhood map that represented the boundaries generally agreed upon by the residents of the city using the smallest available census unit, the enumeration area (EA), as the base unit. This neighborhood map was then used as the basis for mapping spatial variations in health within the city. The first step in demarcating the boundaries was to identify features that limit a person's movement including the major roads, drainage features, and railroad tracks that people use to partially define their neighborhood boundaries. Once an initial set of boundaries were established, they were iteratively modified by walking the neighborhoods, talking to residents, public officials, and others. The resulting neighborhood map consolidated 1,723 EAs into 108 neighborhoods covering the entire Accra metropolitan area. Results indicated that the team achieved 71 percent accuracy in mapping neighborhoods when the neighborhood keyed to the survey EA was compared with the response given by the interviewees in the 2008-2009 Women's Health Survey of Accra when asked which neighborhood they lived in.
该社区已被用作探索健康结果差异的抽样单位。在各种研究中，人口普查区或邮政编码被用作社区的代理，因为这些边界是预先定义的单位，其他数据很容易获得。然而，这些空间单位可能是任意的，并且没有考虑到对居民来说很重要的社会文化行为和身份认同。在这项针对加纳阿克拉市的研究中，我们的目标是创建一张社区地图，该地图以可用的最小人口普查单位——枚举区（EA）为基本单位，呈现出该市居民普遍认可的边界。然后，这张社区地图被用作绘制城市内健康状况空间差异的基础。划定边界的第一步是识别限制人们行动的特征，包括人们用来部分界定其社区边界的主要道路、排水设施和铁轨。一旦建立了初始边界集，就通过走访社区、与居民、政府官员和其他人交谈来反复修改这些边界。最终的社区地图将1723个枚举区合并为108个社区，覆盖了整个阿克拉大都市区。结果表明，在2008 - 2009年阿克拉妇女健康调查中，当将与调查枚举区对应的社区与受访者被问及居住在哪个社区时给出的回答进行比较时，该团队绘制社区的准确率达到了71%。
