Gary Higgs

Urban-rural mortality differentials: controlling for material deprivation.

This paper investigates the relationship between premature mortality and material deprivation, and the differences in this relationship between urban and rural areas. We examine, given comparable measures of affluence or deprivation, whether residual differences exist between urban and rural areas for all-causes of death and, separately, for cancers, circulatory and respiratory diseases. Using 1990-92 mortality data for the 908 wards of Wales we apply statistical analyses based on tabular data and parametric Poisson regression models. Contrasts are sought between six urban and rural categories defined in terms of settlement sizes and the employment structure of rural areas. Inequalities in all-cause premature mortality are widest in the cities, narrowest in the deeper rural areas, and of intermediate and comparable value in other areas of Wales. This is largely a reflection of the different distributions of material deprivation in these areas. After controlling for differences in socio-economic characteristics, using deprivation measures, the tendency for lower mortality in deeper rural areas is substantially reduced. Residual mortality differences between urban and rural areas are shown to be dependent on the way deprivation is measured and the disease group under study. For cancers there are no residual mortality differences, while for respiratory and circulatory diseases some of the residual variation can be accounted for by employment variables, particularly previous employment in the coal mining industry.

Changes in service provision in rural areas. Part 1: The use of GIS in analysing accessibility to services in rural deprivation research

Abstract Previous work has highlighted the importance of public service provision in rural areas particularly for potentially vulnerable groups such as the elderly, unemployed and single parents especially where this coincides with a lack of access to either private or public transport. Disadvantage can often be compounded by limited access to services for such groups with the superior resources of more affluent social groups enabling them to respond and adapt to the increasing centralisation and reduction of services. This paper reviews previous investigations of the implications of changing accessibility to services in rural areas and draws attention to the need for a new research agenda which uses spatial analytical techniques to gauge the current levels of (in)accessibility to key services at the community level. These techniques are illustrated in Part 2 of the paper with reference to changes in post office provision in mid Wales, and the policy significance of incorporating geographical information systems-based measures of provision into traditional area-based indicators of disadvantage is discussed.

Investigating trends in rural health outcomes: a research agenda

Abstract Recent research has highlighted the nature of spatial inequalities in health experience in the UK providing evidence of increasing spatial polarisation. However, these studies have tended to be largely concerned with variations in health in urban settings. Recent economic trends, particularly in the agricultural sector, have focused attention on the socio-economic status of rural populations. With a number of notable exceptions, relatively few studies have been concerned explicitly with issues of rural health. The aims of this paper are to firstly, review recent research which has begun to challenge the notion that rural populations are necessarily healthier than their urban compatriots and secondly, to identify a number of possible explanations for the trends identified in these studies. Variations are examined in relation to methodological problems, socio-economic trends in rural areas, changing accessibility to primary and secondary health care and lifestyle/behavioural factors. A research agenda is presented whereby these types of factors can be further investigated through an integrated approach to studying health variations within rural areas. Finally, the paper concludes by suggesting that more research is needed to investigate the main determinants of health experience and health status in a range of rural settings.

Spatial and temporal variation of mortality and deprivation. 1: widening health inequalities.

In this paper we examine the relationship between premature mortality and material deprivation both over time (the intercensal period, 1981–91) and over space (for the population in wards and ward groups in Wales). Our focus is on the methods of analysis for small area (ward-based) multiple cross-section mortality data and their application to the substantive issue of the persistent and widening inequalities in Wales. In this paper we examine all-cause deaths and mortality by specific disease classes for groups (quintiles) of wards ranked according to standard measures of material deprivation. Although there have been reductions in premature mortality across all deprivation groups in Wales, over the decade, the gap has widened between the most and least deprived areas. Mortality decline in the largest disease category (circulatory) was found to be significantly lower in the most deprived quintile of wards than in the rest of Wales. Compared with results from the North of England, mortality decline in Wales has been rather greater.

Population Georeferencing in England and Wales: Basic Spatial Units Reconsidered:

In this paper the concern is with the increasing number of methods which are available for the georeferencing of population and socioeconomic data. The majority of routine users of such data will tend to treat georeferencing of a transparent process, and will not question the impacts which georeferencing methods may have on substantive applications. In this paper four levels of geographical resolution in England and Wales are considered, between the most detailed census geography and individual property locations, and the potential for the creation of hybrid georeferences by the combination of existing data products is explored. With examples from a study area in Cardiff, South Wales, the interrelationship of the major data products is explored, with reference to basic household counts and incidence data. On the basis of these experiments, the use of hybrid georeferencing systems is reconsidered, highlighting potential applications as well as problems of data standards, confidentiality, and comparability.

Changes in service provision in rural areas. Part 2: Changes in post office provision in mid Wales: A GIS-based evaluation

Abstract This paper develops themes set out in Part 1 of this paper relating to the importance of public service provision in rural areas, particularly for potentially vulnerable members of the community such as the elderly, unemployed and single parents. Changes in a key service sector, post office services, in rural mid Wales over a 15-year period are assessed and analysed in relation to the developing sociodemographic profile of the underlying population. A Geographic Information System (GIS) approach is adopted to chart changing levels of post office provision in the study area, and the subsequent impacts on accessibility to those post offices. The policy significance of developing measures of accessibility to services with a view to incorporating these GIS-generated measures into traditional area-based indicators of disadvantage is highlighted.

The visualization of socio‐economic GIS data using virtual reality tools

This paper addresses two issues: the use of ‘realistic’ environments for the visualization of socio-economic data, and the use of virtual reality tools for the exploration of data from existing GIS databases. ‘Realistic’ is here used in a narrow sense to imply the reconstruction of real-world scenes in which major components of the physical environment are reconstructed to facilitate geographical visualization. A review of visualization techniques for geographically-referenced 3-D data is presented, and the translation of an existing urban GIS database into virtual reality modelling language (VRML) demonstrated for a study area in Cardiff, UK. This work shows that the export of conventional 2-D GIS data into virtual reality toolkits can be relatively straightforward, and offers exciting new avenues for visualization and exploration. We argue that some of the parameters of the true scene such as colour, building shape, and texture may be directly modified in order to represent otherwise unobservable socio-economic characteristics, in the spirit of exploratory data analysis. These issues are of particular importance in the context of current advances towards the dynamic linkage of GIS and virtual reality modelling.

Research Paper. The predictive use of GIS to model property valuations

Abstract GIS is a technology which is ideally suited to analysis of the market values of properties, since such values are based upon spatial comparisons as well as individual property attributes. Great Britain now has a new mechanism of local taxation, the council tax, which is based upon the capital values of properties. Central to the implementation of this tax has been the potentially controversial assignment of properties to valuation ‘bands’. This paper posits that a geographical model embedded within a GIS provides an alternative means of devising credible capital values, and anticipates some of the prospects for the use of GIS in local revenue-raising.

Spatial and temporal variation of mortality and deprivation 2: statistical modelling.

Building on the tabular analyses exemplified in our first paper and widely used in the medical literature, we use generalised linear models to provide a formal, statistical approach to the analysis of mortality and deprivation relationships, and their change over time. Three types of fixed effects model are specified and estimated with the same ward-level data sets for Wales examined in our first paper. They are: Poisson models for analysing mortality and deprivation at a single cross section in time; repeated-measures Poisson models for analysing mortality–deprivation relations, not only at cross sections in time, but also their changes over time; and logit models focusing on temporal changes in mortality–deprivation relationships. Nonlinear effects of deprivation on mortality have been explored by using dummy variables representing deprivation categories to establish the connection between formal statistical models and the tabular approach.

The use of GIS in the analysis of diverse urban databases

Few GIS studies have demonstrated a preparedness to grapple with the messy empirical problems which beset applied research. This paper uses a detailed case study to illustrate some of the problems which are encountered when attempting to integrate widely used urban data sources into a disaggregate GIS. We also anticipate the prospects for information management in the light of apparent changes in the availability of property registers in the UK and the innovation of the UK Ordnance Surveys “Address-Point” product.