iCERi 2016 - 9th Annual International Conference of Education, Research, and Innovation - November 14th, 2016
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Incorporating Spatial Analysis and Geographic Information Systems in Social Work Curriculum
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iCERi 2016 - 9th Annual International Conference of Education, Research, and Innovation - November 14th, 2016
- 1. Incorporating Spatial Analysis and Geographic Information Systems in Social Work Curriculum Erich Purpur GIS Librarian University of Nevada, Reno epurpur@unr.edu 775 682 5706 9th Annual International Conference of Education, Research, and Innovation
- 2. Where is Reno? -Western United States -City of about 400,000 -3.5 hours from San Francisco
- 3. University of Nevada Reno -Founded in 1874 -About 21,000 students -Strong engineering school -41 doctoral programs -trying to become Carnegie ranked research 1 school.
- 4. What is GIS? -A computer system capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced information. What does this mean? -GIS is a data visualization tool -The output is a map but the power lies in the data behind the image -GIS skills are a literacy
- 5. Evidence Based Practice in Social Work -Social Workers need data too -Data influences social work practice -Show work to stakeholders
- 6. Reno Homeless Project -Class studying local homeless population in Reno, Nevada, USA. -Data gathered by going into field and surveying local homeless population -Local social work agencies get money based on number of homeless people in area
- 7. Teams were given zones to look for local homeless, depicted here in Google Earth Example map teams had while in field
- 8. Data Gathered and assembled into spreadsheet
- 9. What GIS tool to use for analysis? ArcGIS, QGIS, Google Earth didn’t meet criteria for use ArcGIS Screenshot QGIS Screenshot
- 10. Class able to analyze and present data Example screenshot from final assignment showing veteran population in city
- 11. Summary -Social work students introduced to new and potentially valuable technology to incorporate into their practice -Tools were low barrier to entry -Students able to visualize data for display or internal use purposes
Editor's Notes
- Hi Everyone. Thanks for listening today. My name is Erich Purpur and I am the GIS Librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno, which is a university in the United States. Today the title of my presentation is “Incorporating Spatial Analysis and Geographic Information Systems in Social Work Curriculum”
- But first to give you some context, I live in Reno, Nevada which is also the location of this study. Reno is a city in the western United States as you can see in this Google Earth Screenshot. About 400,000 people live in the metro area and the city is about 3.5 hours from San Francisco, California and about 7 hours from Las Vegas.
- A little background on the University for you. The University of Nevada, Reno was established in 1874 and now currently has about 21,000 students. The school is a land grant university and has strong engineering programs, especially in Geological and Mining Engineering. The school offers about 40 doctoral programs and is trying to become a Carnegie ranked research 1 school. This is an american ranking of high research output universities.
- What is GIS? -First of all, GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems -A computer system capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced information. What does this mean? -GIS is a data visualization tool and is useful for looking at spatial relationships and patterns between objects. You can discover and communicate meaningful patterns in your data -GIS is not scary and is not only for geographers. A GIS is a tool which applies to nearly every field including the sciences, humanities, social sciences. -The output is a map but the power lies in the data behind the image -GIS skills are a literacy
- The point of the exercise was to expose social work professionals to the power and uses of spatial data. Using data to support practice in the field of social work provides powerful evidence to show stakeholders and informs practice for social work professionals as well. Because GIS is a way to manipulate and display data, a logical link exists here to incorporate it into the social work field. However, social workers are generally not introduced to data manipulation tools, like a GIS program, in school and it is unclear how they are expected to learn it. To exacerbate issues, social workers generally self-identify as “not technically savvy” and may be hesitant to adopt new technology.
- As part of an ongoing project, social work and library faculty have worked together to integrate GIS functionality into Social Work coursework and to study the local homeless population in and around Reno, Nevada. We call this the Reno Homeless Project. The project involves a graduate level class and has been ongoing for several years. The background on this project is that social work agencies in metropolitan areas in the United States receive money from the government based on the size of the local homeless population. So to get those numbers, first the students go out and find the local homeless people. The homeless are defined as only those living on the street, outdoors. People in temporary shelters, living in cars, or any other structure are unfortunately not counted. On this slide you can see a sample data sheet. When a student encounters a homeless person, they ask the person for demographic information and fill out a questionnaire. We then take the data and manipulate it in a GIS software. We have gone through a few iterations of the class now and have tweaked things over time. The challenge here is that social workers know social work, not Geographic Information systems, so finding a GIS tool that is both easy to use and meets the needs of the class is critical. I will talk more about that later but we ended up using Google MyMaps, which is part of Google Drive and is free to everyone, to manipulate the data.
- Back to the project. The class assembled one morning at 4am, because the objective is to catch the homeless while they sleep, and dispersed to different neighborhoods around the city. Each team has a zone, and there are 23 total. These zones were determined by a local social work coordinator. On the right you can see a Google Earth screenshot, in which I drew polygons for each homeless zone around the city. On the left is a handout which students had while in the field and used to determine the bounding areas of their zones.
- Once the data was gathered, it was assembled into a master spreadsheet, which you see a screenshot of here. One field in the questionnaire was a location. Team members were asked to write a street address, street corner, or some other location into this field. The challenge then was to convert that rough location into latitude and longitude coordinates. I used a freely available tool, called “Geocode by Awesome Table”, and is an add on to Google Drive, in order to determine latitude and longitude locations for each homeless person. Geocoding is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates which are then used to place markers or positions on a map. There were only a few errors, which I was able to fix manually, and then we had a complete dataset.
- The tool that brought the whole exercise together was Google MyMaps. In previous years, ESRI’s ArcGIS was the tool used to create the final output. However, it was decided ArcGIS was too powerful a tool and missed the point of this exercise. ArcGIS has extensive functionality but also takes more effort to learn even simple tools. Yet another downside is that ArcGIS can be very expensive. Quite often in practice, free, open source, or web based tools take precedence because of financial concerns. The point of the exercise was to expose social work professionals to the power and uses of spatial data and for that reason an easier tool was chosen. The GIS librarian investigated other tools and web mapping applications such as ArcGIS Online, CartoDB, and OpenGeo Suite, but in the end decided on Google MyMaps. Google MyMaps provided nearly all desirable functionality for this project with a low barrier to entry. The only requirement to use Google Drive is a Google Account, which is free and easy to create. The social work students were able to get valuable experience without much technical proficiency needed.
- The meaningful part data gathered for this exercise was the demographic information associated with each homeless person, which is stored in a tabular format in the attribute table, as well as the physical location of each person. But viewing this information in a tabular spreadsheet is difficult to parse visually. The final spatial presentation in map form more effectively communicates meaningful patterns in the data. What these patterns are is the determination of the cartographer, or each student in this case. The same data has many facets and depending on what the creator wants to display, can look very different. Before faceting the data, the spatial distribution of the homeless population is meaningful. Seeing where these people are raises the question: “Why”? For many reasons, favorable conditions exist for those people to spend the night in some places rather than others. For those familiar with the homeless population in an area these reasons may or may not be known. Because several of the “homeless zones” were new to this year’s project, this year’s data collection was expanded. Once each student chose a variable to variable to display, the results got more interesting. Then, not only is the physical location apparent but the location of different subpopulations are as well. For example, In this slide we have an image showing the spatial distribution of the homeless population, filtered by veteran status. The veteran homeless population may be clustered in one area, and the chronically homeless in another. Visualizing these different subpopulations may reveal previously unknown aspects of the data and can raise additional questions for decision makers. Another variable to consider is the homeless population’s location in relation to other social, government, and community services as well. The class chose to plot one important social service, which is not shown in this slide, and may or may not affect the location of a demographic of the population. For example, veterans may choose to locate closely to the Veterans Affairs hospital, or there could be other factors influencing the location of a subpopulation. The students each chose one or more subpopulations in the data, filtered the dataset, and displayed them. They were also required to submit an essay about how they applied the GIS software and what they learned.
- In conclusion, the Reno homeless project introduced students to new and potentially valuable technology which they will hopefully incorporate into their professional practice. These tools were as easy to use as possible, though some technical proficiency is necessary. In the end, students were able to visualize data for display to stakeholders or for internal purposes.