Spatial video geonarratives and health: case studies in post-disaster recovery, crime, mosquito control and tuberculosis in the homeless

Abstract

BackgroundA call has recently been made by the public health and medical communities to understand the neighborhood context of a patient’s life in order to improve education and treatment. To do this, methods are required that can collect “contextual” characteristics while complementing the spatial analysis of more traditional data. This also needs to happen within a standardized, transferable, easy-to-implement framework.MethodsThe Spatial Video Geonarrative (SVG) is an environmentally-cued narrative where place is used to stimulate discussion about fine-scale geographic characteristics of an area and the context of their occurrence. It is a simple yet powerful approach to enable collection and spatial analysis of expert and resident health-related perceptions and experiences of places. Participants comment about where they live or work while guiding a driver through the area. Four GPS-enabled cameras are attached to the vehicle to capture the places that are observed and discussed by the participant. Audio recording of this narrative is linked to the video via time stamp. A program (G-Code) is then used to geotag each word as a point in a geographic information system (GIS). Querying and density analysis can then be performed on the narrative text to identify spatial patterns within one narrative or across multiple narratives. This approach is illustrated using case studies on post-disaster psychopathology, crime, mosquito control, and TB in homeless populations.ResultsSVG can be used to map individual, group, or contested group context for an environment. The method can also gather data for cohorts where traditional spatial data are absent. In addition, SVG provides a means to spatially capture, map and archive institutional knowledge.ConclusionsSVG GIS output can be used to advance theory by being used as input into qualitative and/or spatial analyses. SVG can also be used to gain near-real time insight therefore supporting applied interventions. Advances over existing geonarrative approaches include the simultaneous collection of video data to visually support any commentary, and the ease-of-application making it a transferable method across different environments and skillsets.

Context and Spatial Nuance Inside a Neighborhood's Drug Hotspot: Implications for the Crime–Health Nexus

“…The spatial video method has been applied in a variety of different locations and situations, including mapping the built environment in association with the crime-health nexus (Curtis and Mills 2011;Curtis et al 2015). Video are collected using Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled video cameras attached to an automobile.…”

“…KDE is a commonly applied method to create "heat maps" in crime, public health, and epidemiological research (Yao, Murray, and Agadjanian 2013;Gerber 2014;Curtis et al 2015). Using the composite SVG for police, community, and ex-offender rides, all mentions of drugs or meth falling inside a kernel (a circular area extending away from a single location) become part of a density calculation.…”

“…Each ride usually lasted between forty-five and ninety minutes. After a ride's completion, the audio was transcribed and mapped (Curtis et al 2015). All of the word paths were combined in ArcGIS 9.2 for each cohort, and queried for the words drug and meth and their variants.…”

Charting Disaster Recovery via Google Street View: A Social Science Perspective on Challenges Raised by the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

“…Curtis et al (2015) add that reliance on GSV restricts the researcher to the available imagery and discourages collection and integration of independent, field-based data.…”

Breaking Out of Surveillance Silos: Integrative Geospatial Data Collection for Child Injury Risk and Active School Transport

“…This emergent geospatial technology has been employed in a wide variety of settings and for different studies, from understanding wildlife habitats, patterns of postdisaster damage, and recovery to physical disorder and environmental health risks. 4,[63][64][65] In these applications, the aim has been to link features of the natural or human environment to their real-world location in order to enable mapping and spatial analysis of dynamic or ephemeral data, particularly in challenging environments.…”