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Incorporating Online Survey and Social Media Data into a GIS Analysis for Measuring Walkability

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Geospatial Technologies for Urban Health

Part of the book series: Global Perspectives on Health Geography ((GPHG))

Abstract

Existing walkability measurements have not considered some important components of the built environment, pedestrians’ preferences, or all walking purposes. As area-based measurements, they may overlook some detailed walkability changes. We propose a Perceived importance and Objective measure of Walkability in the built Environment Rating (POWER) method, which is a line-based approach considering both the perception of pedestrians and subjective characterizing of the urban built environment. Incorporating online survey and social media data, we present a built environment walkability study in a specific environment and the potential for more general scenarios. The survey can be customized for the particular urban environment and capture the preferences of a local population. The social media obtain general opinions from a broader audience. Although focusing on the specific setting at a university campus, we also included the general social media results to supplement the POWER structure and survey findings. Using social media and survey results can bring two scales together to provide a more complete understanding of walkability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We did some digging and found one particular Thai tweet, posted on the first day of our data collection. It was posted by a user with 18.8 k followers, and was retweeted 8352 times during our collection, eventually with more than 13,000 times with some follow-up replies and retweets.

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Acknowledgment

Thanks for the support received from the UGA Sustainability Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Xuan Zhang & Lan Mu

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  1. Xuan Zhang
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Correspondence to Lan Mu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

    Yongmei Lu

  2. Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Eric Delmelle

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Zhang, X., Mu, L. (2020). Incorporating Online Survey and Social Media Data into a GIS Analysis for Measuring Walkability. In: Lu, Y., Delmelle, E. (eds) Geospatial Technologies for Urban Health. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19573-1_8

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