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from the carefully-choose-your-buckets dept.
My job was to examine blood lead data from our local Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint for spatial patterns, or neighborhood-level clusters of elevated levels, so we could quash the doubts of state officials and confirm our concerns. Unbeknownst to me, this research project would ultimately help blow the lid off the water crisis, vindicating months of activism and outcry by dedicated Flint residents.
As I ran the addresses through a precise parcel-level geocoding process and visually inspected individual blood lead levels, I was immediately struck by the disparity in the spatial pattern. It was obvious Flint children had become far more likely than out-county children to experience elevated blood lead when compared to two years prior.
How had the state so blatantly and callously disregarded such information? To me – a geographer trained extensively in geographic information science, or computer mapping – the answer was obvious upon hearing their unit of analysis: the ZIP code.
ZIP codes – the bane of my existence as a geographer. They confused my childhood friends into believing they lived in an entirely different city. They add cachet to parts of our communities (think 90210) while generating skepticism toward others relegated to less sexy ZIP codes.
A tale to remind the scientists and technologists among us why it's important to do our jobs well.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday September 21 2016, @03:28PM
Why not switch to a better geocoding system? The ZIP code was designed nearly half a century ago, surely we have something better by now.
ZIP codes were designed for mail delivery. They still function reasonably well for that. The problem is that they're also a convenient data point that anyone who has your address also knows, and thus they tend to be misappropriated for all sorts of uses they aren't designed for. (Another example beyond this article -- there have been instances where towns outside a major city have been assigned the same first three numbers as the ZIP code of the city itself, resulting in insurance companies charging residents higher "city rates" just because of the numerical similarity in ZIP codes.)
But what's "better"? For statistical analysis, you need something that makes sense for your data. Different types of geographical divisions might be suitable for different applications.
From the article:
More useful are units such as census block groups, wards, planning districts or municipal designations for neighborhoods within a city. Each of these adhere to some temporally consistent, spatially bounded definition, and can more appropriately be used to understand how one neighborhood varies compared to another.
Any or all of these might be appropriate depending on your particular data and application. And ZIP codes might be useful sometimes too. The problem isn't the existence of ZIP codes or their usefulness (since they are still useful), but rather the fact that everyone easily can find your ZIP code and thus use it as a proxy for some more meaningful geographical division, when another division might be more appropriate in that specific application.
Postal addresses (with ZIP codes) are a system already in place for locating people, buildings, etc. to a specific address. Probably what we need are better and more accessible converters to make it easy for those doing data analysis to convert those postal addresses (generally easiest to obtain) into some of the other types of divisions mentioned in the article (and others as well). Presumably some stuff like this may already exist but isn't used widely enough for some reason.