Читать книгу GIS Research Methods - Steven J. Steinberg - Страница 99

In this step in the research process, you must again refer back to your primary research question and conceptual framework. The form of the analysis you select will in part be determined by the type of data you have collected and prepared in the GIS. Some analysis tools work exclusively on vector data and others exclusively on raster data. Of course, you can accomplish many operations with either. Furthermore, if you collected quantitative data, chances are you will use some form of statistical analysis. Many of the common, descriptive statistics are available within the GIS software. However, it is also common to enlist other statistical programs for some portions of the analysis. This is accomplished by extracting key information from the GIS using the spatial tools and exporting the raw numbers into a program such as SPSS, S-PLUS, R, or Excel to further analyze the information before returning it to the GIS to make maps of the results.

If you are working with qualitative data, you may require use of a data program designed specifically for qualitative analysis, such as HyperRESEARCH by Researchware, NVivo, or ATLAS.ti. In identifying your key variables, you can decide which types of contextual or geographic information might aid in studying the relationships between these variables. You can then analyze the geographic information you have collected as part of your study using a variety of methods.

Regardless of the type of data, the most important thing to keep in mind at this stage is to let your project dictate the analysis rather than let the software drive the analysis simply because the software contains a menu option or button. Retuning to your conceptual framework will be essential at this stage because the framework is your guide in the analysis. Chapter 11 provides more detailed discussion of completing the data analysis using GIS.