Techniques in Human Geography

Jim Lindsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781032221144
• eBook ISBN: 9781134733149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The first concise guide to the purposeful use of techniques in human geography. Examining key techniques in detail - survey and qualitative, numerical, spatial and computer-based - the book draws on important case studies, such as the decennial census, to illustrate applications. The importance of up-to-date IT based techniques is particularly stressed, introducing widely recognised applications. A final section explores the Internet, which offers exciting new resources but also creates problems for researchers used to traditional academic fields.

1
Introduction

Like all serious academic disciplines, geography has gone through turbulent times in the post-war years. Since the ‘quantitative revolution’ of the 1960s there has been a constant process of change in methodology. Geographers have developed or, more usually, imported new ideas. After being applied, evaluated, and criticised, these have found their niche or faded into oblivion.

Naturally enough the procession of changes in methodology has been accompanied by the development of different ranges of techniques. The unusually wide range of subjects in which geographers are involved means that geography as a whole has an unparalleled range of techniques at its disposal, ranging from the analysis of pollen assemblages, stream velocity, and atmospheric pollution on the one hand to participant observation of communities and the decoding of cultural landscapes as texts on the other. Renaissance geographers at ease with all of these techniques do not exist. We are all necessarily specialists.

Techniques have tended to be seen as the province of physical geographers. As a veteran of many funding meetings this author can testify that most of the money usually goes to buy equipment used in the physical area. Velocity meters and flumes, microscopes, and satellite stations for remote sensing might appear on the agenda. Big expensive bids for equipment for human geography will not. At one time it seemed as though the technical support needed for a project in human geography was no more than a sharp pencil. If we have moved on, it is by substituting a personal computer for the pencil.

There are grounds for this division. Research projects in physical areas often do require expensive equipment, and on the whole the costs of human projects tend to be measurable not so much in hardware as in time and labour, which do not come out of equipment budgets.¹ However, the equipment imbalance tends to create a false impression that human geographers somehow do not use techniques, reinforcing the impression that some of their physical colleagues already seem to have, that research in human geography is soft and lacking in academic rigour.

The importance of techniques for data collection and analysis in physical geography is probably the main reason why books on techniques in geography tend to be written for physical geographers, or at least emphasise physical examples. There are other reasons too, of course. Physical geography is more consistent in its use of the positivist approach discussed in Chapter 2, and this has created a body of well-defined procedures that any researcher in a particular field will be expected to adopt. It is both necessary and fairly easy to provide descriptions of these for their potential student users. Finally, it has to be said that newly developed techniques and the pieces of equipment that support them are exciting and rather glamorous, and their owners like to show them off as though they were new cars.

Although human geography has played its part in the development of quantitative techniques, the growth of a strong interest in qualitative methods has moved the emphasis into areas where defined procedures are relatively rare, and even in some cases unwelcome. It has to be said that there have indeed been textbooks about techniques for human geographers. In fact one of the earliest was published as long ago as 1971 (Toyne and Newby 1971). However, the number has been very small. On the principle that the devil should not have all the good tunes, this book offers its own contribution. It is an attempt to provide a guide for the 1990s. Anyone who doubts how far things have changed since Toyne and Newby published their book need only compare it with the onscreen tutorials provided by the excellent GeographyCAL software made available in the mid-1990s.²

Research is the basic focus of this book. At its most fundamental level research is simply a consistent way of asking questions and finding answers to them, and it forms an overarching framework which provides a home for all the techniques used by human geographers. Even elementary exercises should be seen in a research context. They are the first steps on a road that will lead to independent research in the form of a dissertation or project.

Although designed for students in the first stages of their academic careers, this text is also intended to look beyond the range of work that a first-year student is likely to carry out, providing a primary foundation for the more exacting projects that will be carried out in later years and directing its users to the sources that will be more appropriate at these levels.

We start by looking at the way that research is organised. Chapter 2 provides an overview of research design, particularly emphasising the importance of realism in choosing questions, working methods, and scales of operation appropriate for small-scale research tasks. Chapter 3 considers how we obtain, categorise, and assess the data we will need in our research work. Chapters 4 to 6 cover two very significant sets of techniques in research work in human geography, interview and questionnaire procedures and statistical testing respectively.

The emphasis in the remaining chapters is rather different. Having looked at techniques in relation to the research process we now turn to the hardware resources on which human geographers can draw in carrying out research tasks. Chapter 7 considers the maps and cartographic process which support all spatial description and analysis. Chapter 8 reviews the generic Information Technology fields most likely to be valuable in our context. All the remaining chapters focus on particular aspects of computer-based resources. In Chapter 9 we examine computer mapping and other specialised forms of geographical computing, and this leads to a more detailed look at Geographical Information Systems in Chapter 10. Finally, in Chapter 11, we explore the Internet, which offers exciting new resources but also creates problems for researchers used to traditional academic fields.

It is not easy to achieve a good balance. If the sweep is too broad, there is a danger that the text will become simply a series of airy generalisations. If there is too close a focus on the mechanics of techniques, the text might become no more than a kind of cookery book of methods, the kind described aptly by one author as being ‘as dull as a description of how to bang a nail on the head with a hammer’ (Hakim 1992: 1). This book tries at all times to steer a middle course between these undesirable extremes. Its role is not to discuss the research process in abstract terms, and at the same time anyone looking for detailed instruction on any of the techniques described will find that the natural step forward is to move from this book to a specialised workbook or manual. Its concern is to map the range of possibilities in their research context, and explain why particular techniques are used in particular contexts rather than describe their working procedures in detail. It emphasises the importance of selecting techniques that will be fit and appropriate for their purpose, and being aware of their strengths and limitations.

Although geography has its own distinct emphasis – not least the concern with patterns in space – it shares a lot of ground with the social sciences, and there has been a good deal of interchange of ideas and methods in the last few decades. Like good Europeans, human geographers do not need passports to cross this particular frontier, and the text therefore moves freely through the relevant territories of social science as well as human geography.

Finally, we should note that we live in rapidly changing times. There have probably been few eras when this was not true of the human and the academic conditions, but ours can justifiably claim to be one in which the process of change has accelerated at rates far faster than ever before. Global transport, globalisation of the economy, and changes in the world’s political balance have all changed the way we perceive and use space. It has been claimed that the development of the Internet might herald the growth of a genuinely spaceless society. Will geography have to reinvent itself?

One of the main themes of modern technology is convergence (Leslie 1996: 13). Information techniques that first developed in isolation are increasingly being integrated with each other. To take a humble but universal example, the domestic television set once sat alone in a corner of the living room. Now it finds itself playing host to video displays, cartridge-driven games, audio CDs and information on CD-ROM, photo-CD, teletext, satellite and cable input, interactive viewer response screens, and the Internet. The process of convergence itself is one of the important forces creating the changes we have just looked at. It also incidentally affects the media through which we study them. A book like this may turn out to belong to the last generation of paper-only texts.

Notes

¹ Things are changing. Although the grassroots perception may remain the same, the Research Councils and other research funding bodies now expect applications to be fully costed in all respects.

² Almost twenty GeographyCAL modules have been produced under the UK Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). They provide useful and stimulating introductions to some themes in human geography as well as generic techniques discussed later in this text, and will be referred to where appropriate.

2
Research and project design – defining the context for the use of techniques

Students become involved in research very early in their courses, perhaps earlier than they realise. This chapter discusses:

• Methodology and research
• Research design
• Project design
• Data generation, analysis, and presentation

Techniques are tools, and all tools are designed with purposes in mind. If you buy a chisel then do nothing more with it than scratch your name on the table-top to demonstrate its sharpness, you have missed the point. In the same way geographers armed with all the skills that a technique can provide will waste their time unless they also knows the right (and wrong) way to use it.

The purpose that drives the application of techniques in human geography is the desire to undertake the research process. There is no need here for a long discussion of the meaning of the word ‘research’. Authors who write at length about methodology and techniques are usually agreed that methodology provides the general framework used to approach the research topic, and techniques or methods are the mechanisms used to carry out the research task itself. On the other hand they often seem happy to leave the term ‘research’ itself undefined, as though we all shared an understanding of its meaning and significance. For our purposes here we can venture a definition of research as the process of systematically seeking answers to questions that are seen to be important by workers in a field. Posing questions and seeking answers is the bedrock of research, and this foundation is shared by all researchers, no matter what their position in the battle over methodology.

However there is a conflict, and it is impossible to stay out of it. Even if we do not take entrenched positions we have to recognise that choices have to be made. As we will see shortly, different areas of research have their own prevailing methodologies and techniques. Lines have been carefully drawn to distinguish between academic territories. However these battle-lines are not permanent. Fashions in research change, and the students of one generation may be encouraged to scoff at the excesses of zeal displayed by a previous generation in applying outmoded methods and techniques. The same fate awaits all fashions. The current of post-war thought has emphasised paradigms rather than unchallenged verities, interpretation, meaning, and symbolism rather than established facts. As the ground shifts underfoot it becomes increasingly dangerous to stand in the same place! The greatest wisdom in research is to be able to tell the difference between methodologies and techniques that are used because they are genuinely appropriate, and those which are used because that is what the research community currently expects. Awareness of this kind comes largely from experience.

The image of conflict is not meant to frighten the reader. A first-year student carrying out a straightforward exercise is not likely to be attacked physically by screaming research fundamentalists. The point is that all geography students are researchers from a very early stage and all research has a methodological context. The term ‘researcher’ might seem rather grandiose for people coming to terms with basic practical exercises for the first time, but all exercises are research projects in miniature, and have to be seen in this broader context. Preparing an essay or a seminar paper is a research exercise in its own right. A simple mechanical exercise in the use of a cartographic or statistical technique might offer you only a little window of choice and action in a framework which has been designed in advance. Nevertheless it carries a methodological loading, even though this may be heavily disguised if the project has not been imaginatively designed. The earlier in your student career you are able to grasp the context in which exercises and projects are offered, the better equipped you will be for individual research, above all for the dissertation that offers most geography students the best chance to display their skill in research techniques.

Research is a problem-solving activity, although a research ‘problem’ is not necessarily something that causes distress or difficulty. It is a question, an intellectual challenge concentrating on the need to acquire knowledge about an issue. Whatever research you are carrying out, it should not be difficult to identify the problem it is meant to solve, and if you cannot see what the problem is, the research may not be worth doing.

Research does not simply happen. All stages in a research project involve thought and decisions. The term ‘research design’ is commonly used to describe this process, but not always in the same way. You will find that some authors use it to cover the whole process of conducting a research project, including the formulation of research questions and the definition of a methodological context (e.g. Hakim 1992, Marshall and Rossman 1995). Others use it much more narrowly to cover the process of designing the data collection and later phases (e.g. Haring et al. 1992). In this text we will settle for a compromise. The term ‘research design’ will be used for the all-embracing strategic process, and ‘project design’ will be employed to cover the narrower tactical issues of putting the research design into practice.

Methodology and research

All research projects try to answer questions. Many research projects tackle questions by framing and testing hypotheses. A hypothesis is at its simplest a proposed answer to a research question. There will often be a great many possible answers, so the research process will involve creating, testing, and discarding different hypotheses until an acceptable one is found. However the stage of the research process at which a hypothesis appears, the way it is tested, or indeed the use of a hypothesis at all, all depend on the methodology the researcher is using. A major methodological issue we must look at before going further is the choice between inductive and deductive reasoning. Both forms of reasoning can be used to test and formulate hypotheses, but in quite distinct ways

Inductive reasoning, broadly speaking, works from the particular to the general. Observation of individual cases is used to propose hypotheses that will solve general questions. One form of inductive reasoning is the method immortalised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes stories, where the fictional detective builds up a composite picture from a series of individual observations to produce a striking solution to a problem. Taking a more mundane geographical example, we might want to find out which mode of transport students used to travel long distances. If we were working inductively we would survey users of all the main transport forms and use our findings to assess the preferences of all the student users we found. Where we use inductive reasoning it is inevitable that the hypothesis is not formulated until there is a body of data to work from.

Deductive logic works from the general to the particular, and uses general rules or laws to test individual cases. If we are using deductive logic we will set up a framework in which certain hypotheses are ‘premises’ from which conclusions can be drawn, e.g. in the form ‘If A and B, then C’. Returning to the student travel example, we might develop a structure like this:

• Coaches offer the cheapest long-distance form of travel (Premise A)
• Students always use the cheapest forms of travel (Premise B)
• Students travelling long distances go by coach (Conclusion C)

If testing of our hypotheses satisfies us that our premises are true, the conclusions too can be accepted as logically correct, and these in turn can be used as premises in further deduction. In other words, if we are able to accept our conclusi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Techniques In Human Geography
• Routledge Contemporary Human Geography Series
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Research and Project Design – Defining the Context for the Use of Techniques
• 3: Handling Data
• 4: Questionnaires, Interviews, and Allied Techniques: Getting Information from People
• 5: Coming to Terms With Statistics
• 6: Statistics In Action
• 7: Maps and Mapping Techniques
• 8: Using Computer Applications
• 9: Computer Mapping
• 10: Geographical Information Systems
• 11: Using the Internet
• Glossary
• Bibliography