Creating a Healthy Environment for Children: GIS Tools for Improving the Quality of the Social Welfare Management System

Abstract

Childhood is considered to be the most vital period for mental, physical, and social development. Even short-term deprivation of nutrition, health care, education, and affection in childhood can have long-term and irreversible negative consequences. Various social assistance programs are being launched around the world to eliminate or alleviate social problems, including those experienced by children in their immediate environment. Different solutions have been proposed around the world, but welfare systems in all countries share the following common features: social assistance is necessary and underfinanced, and social workers struggle to cope with caseloads. As a result, welfare work is stressful and not highly effective. In this study, modern Geographic Information System (GIS) tools for supporting the employees of social assistance centers (SACs) have been proposed. The data relating to welfare beneficiaries were analyzed by nonparametric kernel density estimation and divided into five datasets. The kernel density tool in ArcGIS Pro software (Esri Polska sp. z o.o., Warsaw, Poland) was used to visualize areas with a relatively high prevalence of social problems, as well as areas where the neighborhood can deliver synergistic effects. A multicriteria analysis (MCA) procedure for mapping social problems was proposed, and an algorithm was developed in the GIS environment. The generated maps deliver helpful information for supporting SAC employees, as well as monitoring, planning, and initiating preventive measures. Above all, the presented method was designed to improve living conditions by facilitating the management of welfare workers’ duties. Therefore, the proposed approach had to be effective and easy to use without an advanced knowledge of GIS tools.

Mapping the Optimal Rural Areas to Invest in through the LEADER Approach: Case Study—Extremadura (SW Spain)

“…Most social problems do not have unique answers but are linked to each other and to what the researcher wants to study. Hence, works that identify optimal sites for locating activities such as tourism [43], public facilities [30,42,44,45], or even social services for certain groups [30,42,[44][45][46] stand out. Extremadura being the study area, MCE has been used for the location of second homes in its rural environment [47].…”

Shaping Sustainable Cities: A Long-Term GIS-Emanated Spatial Analysis of Settlement Growth and Planning in a Coastal Mediterranean European City

“…The analysis was carried out mid-2021 using ArcGIS, a software, v. Pro 1.0 developed by ESRI that offers advanced tools for cartographic production, spatial analysis, data processing, conversion, visualization, and data management. More specifically, the ArcGIS Pro Kernel Spatial Analyst tool was used, employing the quartic kernel function described by Silverman (1986, p.76, Equation 4.5) (see also [99][100][101][102]) on a bandwidth basis for the PLANAR method. The spatial analysis in this study utilized imagery with a spatial resolution of 5 m, which is widely recognized as suitable and sufficient for the analysis conducted in this research, as supported by the existing scholarly literature [103,104].…”