Human fieldwork

Question 1

What is the human geography enquiry title?

Answer 1

To investigate the pattern of housing and environmental quality in Reigate

Question 2

What is the geographical theory?

Answer 2

Land use zoning, Bid rent theory (land values in cities/towns), urban sprawl and historic concentric ring growth of towns (Burgess theory), commuter settlements

Question 3

What are my primary data sources?

Answer 3

Environmental Quality Survey and Housing Quality survey, photos

Question 4

What are my secondary data sources?

Answer 4

Census data, Index of Multiple Deprivation, Zoopla for house prices

Question 5

What did we infer about Reigate from the secondary sources of data?

Answer 5

Reigate is an affluent area
What we thought about housing quality is backed up by data

Question 6

What risks were associated with this fieldwork enquiry?

Answer 6

Being hit by traffic
Mitigation: cross roads at zebra crossing/designated crossings where possible

Getting lost/abducted by a stranger
Mitigation: Meeting places and times established, emergency contact number in phones

Question 7

What is the environmental quality survey?

Answer 7

A bi-polar analysis assessing the attractiveness of various features of an environment on a scale of 2+ to 2-

Question 8

What is the housing quality survey?

Answer 8

score given to various features linked to housing quality e.g. house type, number of trees, front garden size

Question 9

What are the types of data presentation used?

Answer 9

bar chart
using GIS to present data - EQS scores
scatter graph (y -axis = house score, x-axis = distance from CBD)

Question 10

What are the advantages of using a bar chart?

Answer 10

good visual technique for categorical data making it easy and quick to analyse at a glance

can see trends of environmental quality between streets easily

Question 11

What are the disadvantages of using a bar chart?

Answer 11

using too few categories (environmental qualities displayed) can mask important patterns in the data

Question 12

What are the advantages of using a scatter graph?

Answer 12

easy to construct and understand
good to compare and spot trends

Question 13

What are the disadvantages of using a scatter graph?

Answer 13

hides anomalies
scores are averages
only considers distance not height of land or views

Question 14

What are the advantages/disadvantages of a range?

Answer 14

simple to calculate and easy to understand
but…
leaves anomalies (extreme values) distorting data

Question 15

What are the advantages/disadvantages of inter-quartile range?

Answer 15

useful for comparing two or more data sets, may have similar results but different spread of data
but…
less use on its own; best used when comparing data sets

Question 16

How does the pattern of housing quality and environmental quality vary across Reigate?

Answer 16

tends to be better in areas of higher altitude
increases with distance from the CBD of Reigate

Question 17

What is the explanation for this conclusion?

Answer 17

further away from CBD housing quality improves with larger and more well maintained houses found further away from main high street
The bid rent theory
Houses in edges tend to have large driveways, front and back gardens, and garage. Houses closer to CBD tend to be more terraced housing with on street parking

Question 18

What is the does the bid rent theory state?

Answer 18

states more affluent housing is located in these areas as people will trade of access to CBD and move to edges as prefer to have more land and space and be in more attractive location.

Question 19

What is the positive evaluation to my conclusion?

Answer 19

Methods support conclusions to some extent. Splitting Reigate into zones provided good spatial coverage. 10 streets samples meant good representation of area achieved

Question 20

What is the negative evaluation to my conclusion?

Answer 20

problems with data collection methods:
subjective nature of carrying out an EQS and HQS - one persons view different from somebody else’s, could either over or under score and area for environmental quality

EIS only graded environmental features and qualities on small scale of 2+ to 2-, hard to differentiate good and bad quality - enlarge to 5+ to 5- next time

Certain streets not represented in data collected so not true representation necessarily of urban zoning and Reigate. Sample size of streets investigated needs to be enlarged

Question 21

What are the improvements in my evaluation?

Answer 21

results could be supported by Census and Index and Multiple Deprivation data which would provide a greater insight into socio-economic characteristics

Question 22

Practice Q:
give an example of how your geographical enquires could be improved

Answer 22

problems with assessing score for each house is one persons result are different to another
this affected results because could have over/underestimated score
tom improve method of scoring we could have on person judge each house
this would improve accuracy of results as avoids judgemental error

Question 23

Justify one primary data collection method used in human geography enquiry

Answer 23

environmental quality survey
useful as allowed easily collect data
and enable qualitative data which meant opinion to be quantified

Question 24

Why was our chosen location suitable for data collection?

Answer 24

Close to school, easily accessible so could walk and survey lots of houses