MAPPING THE ECOLOGICAL INTERVIEW: GEOGRAPHIC VISUALIZATION FOR EXPLORING QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ACTIVITY SPACE DATA

Abstract

There is ever greater recognition in the social and health sciences that neighborhood context should be incorporated in studying human behavior. In terms of analyzing urban human behavior, activity space data (i.e. data associated with an individual's home and routine activity locations) can offer diverse information. However, it is challenging to explore and interpret activity space data, which often involve qualitative and quantitative variables describing both the environment and people's travel-activities. This paper will present a prototype software environment to visualize qualitative and quantitative urban activity space data. A system is developed to visualize the data generated by the Ecological Interview, a method for collecting activity space data, social network data, and perception of place data. This application integrates data on adolescents' travel behaviors, as well as their individual, social and community resources, by mapping subjects' activity spaces using multiple visual attributes (e.g. symbolization, color). Users can investigate the activity space data through an interactive interface developed using a commercial GIS software package. The case studies show how the visualization assists in the exploratory studies of activity space data. The visualization can also be used in post-modeling analysis through in-depth investigation of the multiple attributes for the best-fit and worst-fit cases.