Addressing the uncertain geographic context problem by advanced spatial analysis approaches based on GIS and GPS for environmental health studies
Scholars in the fields of health geography, urban planning, and transportation studies have long attempted to understand the relationships among human movement, environmental context, and their effect on health outcomes. Considerable research has been conducted to advance our understanding of how environmental exposures affects health behaviors and outcomes. In many of these studies, however, environmental exposures are found to have inconsistent associations with health. The uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) is one of the most important methodological issues that contribute to the inconsistent findings. This dissertation explores the methodological issues in environmental health research causing the uncertain findings and how the UGCoP influences research findings, proposes an activity space approaches to comprehensively assess the individual exposures to environmental contexts, and designs an innovative environmental exposure evaluation framework to spatiotemporally assess individual environmental exposure and evaluated the environmental effects on health outcomes. With empirical analysis of real-world applications with the GPS tracking data and environmental context data collected at Chicago, IL, and Columbus, OH, these proposed approaches are proved perform better than currently widely used methods. Taking into account the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of individual environmental exposures, the proposed methods also helps to mitigate the UGCoP in important ways. They may be used in environmental health studies concerning environmental influences on a wide range of health behaviors and outcomes, and thus help to improve our understanding of the environmental effects on different health behaviors and outcomes.
Environmental health, the uncertain geographic context problem, activity space, environmental context cube, exposure assessment, food environment, physical activity, GPS, GIS
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign