Speakers
Description
Health geographers have been shifting the allied fields of human geography, epidemiology, and public health towards research designs that account for both space and time. Longitudinal designs are recognized as superior to cross-sectional designs given their ability to infer casual relationships and fore/backcast the role of socio-environmental determinants of health outcomes. While traditional cohort-based designs are still desirable, health geographers have been developing new research designs that gather and synthesize quantitative and qualitative data to enable unique insights about space and time in health. Panelists will briefly share their methods, followed by a discussion of the challenges and future of space-time research in the allied fields of health geography. Wray will discuss the use of a novel geographic ecological momentary assessment tool to collect spatial data, survey responses, and videos from participants in real-time as they experience places. Smith will illustrate the applications of smartphone-based walk-along interviews and observational data collection with a diverse range of populations. Sadler will discuss the use of historical built environment data to retrospectively examine health outcomes and structural racism in these outcomes. Lafreniere will describe using historical administrative data and statistical microdata to construct novel models of past infectious disease outbreaks. Following these presentations, panelists will engage in a moderated discussion among themselves and with the audience, with Widener acting as the nominated discussant. The session is expected to discuss the challenges of managing data and participants, how to develop funding applications that enable long-term research designs, and the future of space-time health geographies.
