Spatial Demography – Applied Spatial Statistics

Catalog description

This class will expose sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, environmental scholars, criminologist, economists and public health scholars to the vast array of spatial data that are available, encourage them to think critically and creatively about how different forms of spatial data can be integrated into research, and introduce them to the spatial analytical methods that are increasingly encountered in statistical inquiry. This course will examine the characteristics of spatial data and focus on methods appropriate for exploring and modeling such data. This is not a GIS class, but rather it is a class on how to apply statistics to spatial data. We will discuss spatial demography concepts in academic, government, and applied settings; data collection strategies that facilitate fieldwork; and the new directions and challenges associated with spatial demography techniques. We will rely on Saint Louis as a social laboratory to illustrate the theoretical and methodological concepts.