Geospatial Applications in Epidemiology: Location, Location, Location

Since the conception of epidemiology, geographic location has played a fundamental role. The distribution of health outcomes varies by location and is often associated with location. Integrating geographic information systems (GISs) into epidemiological methods has become a common practice, is decidedly beneficial, and is often necessary to understand and predict health patterns more accurately. While the advancement and increased availability of technologies bring new opportunity for epidemiological endeavors, it also presents theoretical challenges that require important considerations and practical challenges that require an understanding of environmental and biological health. This chapter will explain spatial epidemiological studies’ conceptualization, application, and interpretation. This chapter will detail (1) the history and purpose of spatial epidemiological study design in public health, (2) geographic themes applied to spatial epidemiology, (3) examples of spatial epidemiological applications, and (4) interpretation of common spatial epidemiological statistics. The chapter will discuss and dissect spatial statistics relevant to epidemiological studies and highlight the types of real-world research questions using real-world examples. We will also describe the foundations of spatial statistics and how they differ from classical statistical methods.