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Geography IA - need some help with display & analysis (land use and questionnaire)


Nicanniko

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Hello everybody :)

I'm doing my geography IA in urban environments - the topic is "What is the impact of Warsaw agglomeration on [my town] in terms of availability and structure of goods and services?". As my methods, I have a land use survey and a questionnaire survey, and I have a few doubts .

About land use survey - I' m going to take into account only commercial uses of land (no public offices/residential areas etc.). The town is small, and my plan is to just go along all streets and record on a sheet of paper what I see :P I have 16 types of shops/services, and I'm wondering what kind of map should I use. Print screen Google Maps map and print it, and then mark what I recorded on a digital one? Or maybe better do my own computer-derived map based on a ready one? (possibly using layers, and drawing only curves with street names and classified points).

And in general - what techniques would you suggest to use for display and analysis in this case? I was thinking about diversity index for land use (=>availability from research question), and as I'm going to look for correlation between visiting Warsaw for some education/job purposes and shopping there, perhaps Spearman's rank correlation?

What else would be useful? Any mapping, graphing, statistical tips?

Sorry if it obvious for you, but I'm struggling to do my IA with no feedback available at the moment, and it's a bit messy for me :(

And forgive a long post!

Edited by Nicanniko
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Ah, the good old days of Geography IA land-use mapping - actually, I only finished my IA a few weeks ago so the memories and horrors of drawing my map are still fresh in my mind. I sort of hastily put something together for my urban IA, so I sympathise with your trials and tribulations.

I did my land-use map by making a rough draft on a piece of paper, noting down very, very, very rough estimates of frontage (sometimes measured in some way with a trundle wheel). I also noted down land-use, and other relevant details I needed for my IA. Then, I transferred it onto a copy of a 'base map' of the town centre I was looking it, which allowed me to get a rough scale map of the area without hand-drawing it. Then, I added in my own to-scale shop divisions of frontage, and used a complicated colour legend for land-use and other features.

I guess you could use a computer, and that's what others in my class did, but I am technologically incompetent so I avoided it. However, I do think that a computer map would probably look neater - although it might not look as 'engaged' in the mapping (although this is a bit of a ridiculous assertion).

In terms of statistical tools, I struggled with this myself. I think that diversity index is a good place to start - although it is important to note that it's usually used for ecological purposes, so it has been adapted to urban land-use calculations. I thought that this website was useful for helping me find and evaluate my statistical tools, as well as other geography IA related things. You've probably already seen it if you have been searching a lot, but in case you haven't, hope it is useful.

Otherwise, good luck! I also too apologise for the length of my post, but hopefully it has been productively long.

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Thanks a lot for your answer! It's really good to know there's someone out there to help :)

I solved my problem with map making using Inkscape - I print screened Google Maps (quite small segments at one time), added layer on top of it, drew curves and then switched off the Google maps layer - and quite a neat map was ready :) Hope it shows engagement, because I pored over it for a few hours! So it's basically how I thought it would look like earlier, but I couldn't imagine it then because I had no idea how Inkscape worked.

And yes, I have seen that page - I agree it's really useful :) In case somebody needs it, others that I would recommend are:

http://greenfieldgeography.wikispaces.com/IB+Geography+Internal+Assessment

http://www.geography-fieldwork.org/geographical_enquiry/stage1.htm

http://www.geographyalltheway.com/igcse_geography/fieldwork/fieldwork.htm

I am a bit afraid that I have too poor or little data to analyse - it'll be about 400 hunded shops/service points with their location (quite roughly marked and with not so perfect classification, though...) and 30 questionnaires (5 simple and 2 complex questions about shopping place preferences). Do you think it sufficient, and not too superficial?

I'd be really grateful for some opinion.

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