Human fieldwork Flashcards
What is the human geography enquiry title?
To investigate the pattern of housing and environmental quality in Reigate
What is the geographical theory?
Land use zoning, Bid rent theory (land values in cities/towns), urban sprawl and historic concentric ring growth of towns (Burgess theory), commuter settlements
What are my primary data sources?
Environmental Quality Survey and Housing Quality survey, photos
What are my secondary data sources?
Census data, Index of Multiple Deprivation, Zoopla for house prices
What did we infer about Reigate from the secondary sources of data?
Reigate is an affluent area
What we thought about housing quality is backed up by data
What risks were associated with this fieldwork enquiry?
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
What is the environmental quality survey?
A bi-polar analysis assessing the attractiveness of various features of an environment on a scale of 2+ to 2-
What is the housing quality survey?
score given to various features linked to housing quality e.g. house type, number of trees, front garden size
What are the types of data presentation used?
bar chart
using GIS to present data - EQS scores
scatter graph (y -axis = house score, x-axis = distance from CBD)
What are the advantages of using a bar chart?
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
What are the disadvantages of using a bar chart?
using too few categories (environmental qualities displayed) can mask important patterns in the data
What are the advantages of using a scatter graph?
easy to construct and understand
good to compare and spot trends
What are the disadvantages of using a scatter graph?
hides anomalies
scores are averages
only considers distance not height of land or views
What are the advantages/disadvantages of a range?
simple to calculate and easy to understand
but…
leaves anomalies (extreme values) distorting data
What are the advantages/disadvantages of inter-quartile range?
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
How does the pattern of housing quality and environmental quality vary across Reigate?
tends to be better in areas of higher altitude
increases with distance from the CBD of Reigate
What is the explanation for this conclusion?
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
What is the does the bid rent theory state?
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.
What is the positive evaluation to my conclusion?
Methods support conclusions to some extent. Splitting Reigate into zones provided good spatial coverage. 10 streets samples meant good representation of area achieved
What is the negative evaluation to my conclusion?
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
What are the improvements in my evaluation?
results could be supported by Census and Index and Multiple Deprivation data which would provide a greater insight into socio-economic characteristics
Practice Q:
give an example of how your geographical enquires could be improved
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
Justify one primary data collection method used in human geography enquiry
environmental quality survey
useful as allowed easily collect data
and enable qualitative data which meant opinion to be quantified
Why was our chosen location suitable for data collection?
Close to school, easily accessible so could walk and survey lots of houses
