2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Advances in Analytic Methods for Neighborhood Data 287
ments in neighborhood delineation and data sparseness that are relevant
to the measurement of the collective properties of places.
Finally, spatial patterns and dynamics are of increasing interest with
respect to community indicators. Spatial metrics take seriously the concept
of scale and use geographical information system (GIS) tools to quantify
important dimensions such as distance, contiguity, density, clustering,
and spread. Spatial measures can be used to calibrate access to resources,
exposure to social or environmental problems, or the spatial behavior of
individuals and organizations. These metrics can be extended over time to
assess shifting locations and movement. We report on some advances in
spatial analysis for neighborhood data in the next major section.
Given our focus on recent advances and promising analytic techniques,
we make no claim to covering the breadth of methodological considerations
required for neighborhood data analysis. However, the analytic
tools and techniques covered below have useful applications across several
of the purposes and conceptual focuses discussed above.
Review of Methodological Tools and Techniques
The methodological review is organized under the following topics:
• Specifying neighborhood as a social and geographic unit. There is debate
about how the concept of neighborhood should be operationalized
for analysis. This section describes some innovative methods of
delineating neighborhoods for varying purposes.
• Addressing data sparseness. Because they are often small areas, there
may be too few data points within some neighborhoods to make
reliable measures. This section describes techniques to improve
measurement reliability under these circumstances.
• Combining indicators for multidimensional metrics and classification.
Neighborhoods are seldom one dimensional, and many analytic
problems call for methods of data reduction or classification. This
section reviews techniques that have been found useful for multidimensional
neighborhood analysis.
• Assessing the geography of resources and disamenities. Whether residents
can conveniently access resources and avoid exposure to negative
social and environmental conditions is not simply a matter of
determining what is located within a neighborhood. In this section