2. Using Geovisualization and Geospatial Analysis to Explore Respiratory Disease and Environmental Health Justice in New York City

The goal of this chapter is to illustrate how complex issues in environmental health justice analysis can benefit from geovisualization and exploration within a Geographic Information Science (GISc) framework. Individual health outcome variables, such as hospitalizations due to respiratory disease, can be very difficult to interpret without a geographic context; and interactions amongst variables such as disease, socio-demographic characteristics, or environmental exposures, further complicate an accurate interpretation of the data. Data exploration and visualization through mapping and spatial analysis often provides a more robust understanding of the data, as well as improved clarity in viewing the phenomena under study, which will lead to better design of further analyses and additional hypothesis generation, in an iterative fashion. In the first part of this chapter, we use a hypothetical data set to illustrate some of the data exploration, geovisualization, statistical methods, and geospatial analyses. In the second part of the chapter, we use a worked example of respiratory disease and socio-demographic variables in New York City to assess potential environmental justice impacts, in order to further demonstrate the importance of geovisualization and geospatial analysis in achieving a better understanding of environmental health issues.