Geographers play important roles in public health research, particularly in understanding healthcare accessibility, utilisation, and individual healthcare experiences. Most accessibility studies have benefited from the increased sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS). Some studies have been enhanced with semi‐structured in‐depth interviews to understand individual experiences of people as they access healthcare. However, few accessibility studies have explicitly utilised individual in‐depth interview data in the construction of new GIS accessibility measures. Using mixed methods including GIS analysis and individual data from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews, we offer satisfaction‐adjusted distance as a new way of conceptualising accessibility in GIS. Based on fieldwork in a predominantly lower‐income community in Columbus, Ohio (USA), we find many residents felt neighbourhood healthcare facilities offered low‐quality care, which suggested an added perceived distance as they attempt to access high‐quality healthcare facilities. The satisfaction‐adjusted distance measure accounts for the perceived distance some residents feel as they search for high‐quality healthcare in lower‐income urban neighbourhoods. In moving beyond conventional GIS and re‐conceptualising accessibility in this way, we offer a more realistic portrayal of the issues lower‐income urban residents face as they attempt to access high‐quality healthcare facilities. The work has theoretical implications for conceptualising healthcare accessibility, advances the mixed‐methodologies literature, and argues for a more equitable distribution of high‐quality healthcare in urban neighbourhoods.

Kibler, K. M., G. Cook, L. G. Chambers, M. Donnelly, T. Hawthorne, F. Rivera, and L. Walters. 2018. Integrating sense of place into ecosystem restoration: a novel approach to achieve synergistic social-ecological impact. Ecology and Society 23(4):25. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10542-230425

We utilized a participatory mapping approach to collect point locations, photographs, and descriptive data about select built environment stressors identified and prioritized by community residents living in the Proctor Creek Watershed, a degraded, urban watershed in Northwest Atlanta, Georgia. Residents (watershed researchers) used an indicator identification framework to select three watershed stressors that influence urban livability: standing water, illegal dumping on land and in surface water, and faulty stormwater infrastructure. Through a community–university partnership and using Geographic Information Systems and digital mapping tools, watershed researchers and university students designed a mobile application (app) that enabled them to collect data associated with these stressors to create a spatial narrative, informed by local community knowledge, that offers visual documentation and representation of community conditions that negatively influence the environment, health, and quality of life in urban areas. By elevating the local knowledge and lived experience of community residents and codeveloping a relevant data collection tool, community residents generated fine-grained, street-level, actionable data. This process helped to fill gaps in publicly available datasets about environmental hazards in their watershed and helped residents initiate solution-oriented dialogue with government officials to address problem areas. We demonstrate that community-based knowledge can contribute to and extend scientific inquiry, as well as help communities to advance environmental justice and leverage opportunities for remediation and policy change.

We introduce critical reflection mapping as a novel and hybrid research methodology for examining the sociospatial perceptions of researchers in new research settings, particularly international ones. The methodology, theoretically situated within the critical geographic information systems literature, combines two existing research methods (qualitative sketch mapping and critical reflection) to elicit original ways in which researchers can critically reflect on an area new to them while spatially linking these qualitative place-based reflections to sketch maps. The methodology allows for synergistic data sets to inform each other and to be analyzed together rather than separately. Through critical reflection mapping, we demonstrate how multiple data sets and methods are combined so that critical reflection and word clouds add significant intellectual value by making another layer of textual information immediately accessible to qualitative sketch mapping data analysis. We present two case studies in Belize and Panama from our current community geography research agendas to demonstrate the viability as well as the caveats of this novel methodology for understanding and representing the immediate sociospatial perceptions of researchers. In the context of international research experiences discussed in this article, the methodology captures individual responses to features of the built environment including walkability and sustainability; documents the changing emotions a newly immersed researcher has in a largely unfamiliar geographic setting; and connects new experiences in a foreign research setting to an individual's everyday lived experiences, positionality, and multiple identities. It also makes these experiences more visible to fellow researchers in a large research team and thus lends itself as a potential forum for shared reflection.