Читать книгу GIS Research Methods - Steven J. Steinberg - Страница 37

Florence Kelly was an applied researcher, a women’s rights activist, a child labor law advocate, and one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Kelly believed the power of research could help improve conditions in society. To this end, in 1893, Kelly used laborious geographic analysis, without a computer, to map the “Slums of the Great Cities Survey Maps” (figures 1.8 and 1.9). Kelly, a resident of Chicago’s famous Hull House, led a federally funded study to identify poverty in urban areas (Brown 2004). Hull House, run by Jane Addams, provided aid and social organizational skills to Chicago’s poor. Kelly’s study involved interviewing all of the residents who lived near Hull House in Chicago to find out whether they lived in tenements, rented rooms, or owned homes (Addams 1895).

Figure 1.8 Among the Hull House Settlement research projects were a series of detailed studies of its neighborhoods. These settlements were home to many recent immigrants to Chicago. The majority of these individuals emigrated from central, southern, and eastern Europe. This map originally appeared in “Hull-House Maps and Papers” and shows the nationalities of residents of the neighborhoods bordered by Polk, Twelfth, Halsted, and Jefferson Streets. Hull House Map (Nationalities), 1895, Northwestern University.

Figure 1.9 Rear houses near the West Side area, off an alley near Hull House, circa 1910. Courtesy of University of Illinois at Chicago Jane Addams Memorial Collection, JAMC neg. 1054.

A very important aspect of Kelly’s study was that she recorded the geographic locations of the respondents she interviewed. Kelly was unique in that she transferred much of the sociodemographic, employment, and housing data collected about individual households onto maps of the city to illustrate geographic patterns of poverty. She was a pioneer in integrating geographic variables into the study of social inequality. This was one very early application of spatial analysis techniques, albeit without the benefit of GIS, to study social inequality. Kelly believed that the scientific documentation of social inequalities could help lead to improving the working and housing conditions of the poor. Thus, geographic location can be a very important factor to consider when studying social problems.

Today, researchers can employ the same approach, but the work will be much easier given the advances of GIS technology and software.