GIS and Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences : Coding, Mapping, and Modeling

This is the first book to provide sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, and other social scientists with the methodological logic and techniques for doing spatial analysis in their chosen fields of inquiry.

The book contains a wealth of examples as to why these techniques are worth doing, over and above conventional statistical techniques using SPSS or other statistical packages.

GIS is a methodological and conceptual approach that allows for the linking together of spatial data, or data that is based on a physical space, with non-spatial data, which can be thought of as any data that contains no direct reference to physical locations.

Robert Nash Parker (Ph.D., Duke University) is Co-Director of the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies at University of California, Riverside. He has long been interested in the useful application of methods originally pioneered outside of the social sciences (i.e. Structural Equation Modeling (psychology), HLM (education), logistic regression (Economics), ridge regression (chemistry) to the social sciences.

Emily Asencio (Ph.D., University of California, Riverside) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Academic Center for Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention at the University of California, Riverside.