Geography

This encyclopedia has a whole section on Methods.

Key Methods in Geography is an introduction to the principal methodological issues involved in the collection, analysis and presentation of geographical information. It is unique in the reference literature for providing an overview of qualitative and quantitative methods for human and physical geography. An accessible primer, it will be used by students as a reference throughout their degree, on all issues from research design to presentation. This second edition has been fully revised and updated and includes new chapters on internet mediated research, diaries as a research method, making observations and measurements in the field, and the analysis of natural systems. ...

This text is an essential guide to current research approaches in human geography, covering all aspects of undertaking a geography research project, from the selection of an appropriate topic to the organisation and writing of the final report. ...

With real world examples throughout and guided further reading for each chapter, it is an inspiring guide for students carrying out their own research in urban geography, urban planning, urban studies and urban sociology courses.

This comprehensive textbook offers a conceptual and practical introduction to research methodology, data collection, and techniques used in both human and physical geography. It explores a full range of contemporary geographic techniques, including statistics, mathematical analysis, GIS, and remote sensing. ...

Ellen Semple's Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) - a treatise on what would later be called environmental determinism - coincided with the emergence of geography as an independent academic discipline in North America and Britain. Highly controversial and written by one of America's first female professional geographers, it was considered by some a monument to Semple's scholarship and erudition, whilst for others it was conceptually flawed. And yet its influence on the development and direction of the new discipline of geography was profound. ...

From chapters on the scientific method and fundamental research concepts, to experimental design, sampling and statistical analysis, the text offers an excellent introduction to the key concepts of geographical research. The content is applicable for students at the beginning of their studies right through to planning and conducting dissertations. ...

The complex interactions between human and physical systems confronting geographers pose unique conceptual, methodological, and practical complications when 'doing research'. Graduate students in a broad range of related fields need to learn how to tackle the discipline-specific issues of space, place, and scale as they propose and perform research in spatial sciences. This practical textbook and overview blends plenty of concrete examples of geographic research and case studies to familiarize readers with the research process as it demystifies and exemplifies how to really do it. ...

From the oceans to continental heartlands, human activities have altered the physical characteristics of Earth's surface. With Earth's population projected to peak at 8 to 12 billion people by 2050 and the additional stress of climate change, it is more important than ever to understand how and where these changes are happening. Innovation in the geographical sciences has the potential to advance knowledge of place-based environmental change, sustainability, and the impacts of a rapidly changing economy and society. Understanding the Changing Planet outlines eleven strategic directions to focus research and leverage new technologies to harness the potential that the geographical sciences offer.

The archive—broadly conceived—is a crucial container of historical evidence that can be used to gain insight into and an understanding of past geographies. Archival research, a methodology typically employed by human geographers, can provide us with important details of past geographical phenomena such as migrations, urbanization, and population redistribution; it can help us understand how past social, political, and natural geographies were “known,” represented, and contested; and it provides the opportunity to investigate what it might have meant to have been a certain person or peoples in specific spatio-historical contexts. ...

In the social sciences in general and geography in particular, the popularity of the concept of discourse is closely linked to the philosophical approaches and epistemological shifts associated with “post-structuralism” and the cultural and linguistic turns. Very broadly speaking, discourse analysis is concerned with the constitution of knowledge on the one hand and power relations, subjectivities, and identities on the other. Discourse analysts argue that social realities—what people believe to be true or false and what norms, values, and understandings of the world they act upon—are not objectively given but subject to symbolic-linguistic representations. ...

Interview skills have been a fundamental component of the qualitative researcher’s toolkit for decades. Since the cultural turn in the social sciences in the 1990s, researchers have sought to recognize the delicate subjectivities attached to people’s lived experiences that challenge (and reject) the objectivist and constructivist ideologies that form the basis for quantitative scientific approaches. Importantly, interview skills constantly evolve, and, for decades, qualitative researchers have interrogated the power imbalances and positionalities involved in the production of knowledge. ...

Life writing analysis emerged in recent years as a term used to describe that set of qualitative research methods that tell stories in concrete, innovative ways while retaining the rigor of theoretical insight and conceptual framings. Life writing analysis includes methodological approaches centered on autobiography, autoethnography, biography, oral history, and narrative analysis. It also includes collaborative writing strategies and story telling as a method of inquiry. In geography, the growth of life writing analysis can be traced to and situated within feminist attempts to tell stories without losing the entanglements of living the everyday. ...

Visual analysis spans a wide remit in human geography and is deeply tied up with visual theory and a number of “turns”: cultural, nonrepresentational/performative, participatory. This article brings together texts that have a focus on analyzing visual representations, visual technologies, and the acts of viewing and of producing visual media, highlighting the differences between methodologies used and the theoretical work they are informed by or most linked with. It is not possible to group contributions by modes of analyses, since geographers often engage with multiple methods simultaneously. ...

Qualitative geographic information systems (qual-GIS) incorporates nonquantitative data into GIS, integrates qualitative data collection and analysis with quantitative spatial analysis facilitated by GIS, adopts epistemologies typically associated with qualitative research, or a combination of these. Qual-GIS is simultaneously represented as a spatially oriented organizer of qualitative data, a mixed-methods research approach, and an open-ended style of knowledge making. Qual-GIS emerged as a response to criticisms that GIS is rigidly embedded in positivist epistemologies. ...

Much of the current qualitative scholarship in geography can be characterized as inductive or descriptive, theory-building work. In understanding human experience, qualitative methods aim to be holistic and to articulate actual causes of particular events or phenomena, thus preserving the context of “data” in collecting and producing evidence.

The term “quantitative research” refers to the systematic scientific investigation of quantitative properties and phenomena and their relationships, by using statistical methods. It includes the analysis of numerical spatial data, the development of spatial theory, and the constructing and testing of mathematical models of spatial processes. As geographers know, spatial analysis is very important. The aim of spatial analysis is to understand differences across space rather than regularities. Quantitative methods have been an integral part of human geography since the quantitative revolution of the 1950s. ...

Geography prospered as a qualitative discipline until a paradigm shift known as the quantitative revolution in the 1940s and 1950s, in which geographers switched to objective, empirical, and scientific methods (such as closed-ended surveys) to explain, represent, and understand the human and physical world. Quantitative research explained phenomena and relationships with statistical methods. In the last few decades, however, a resurgence of qualitative methodology has been viewed as scientific to conduct research in the vast spectrum of geography. The four most basic types and commonly used methods of qualitative data are grouped into observations, interviews, documents, and audio-visual materials. ...