Geographic Problems & Perception

In addition to issues in overall availability of food sources, there has been increasing attention brought to the geographic problems and perceptions a person may have regarding the geography in which they live and how they are affected by those area-based attributes within that geography. Perception of available resources becomes a geographic problem for people as they often misperceive what is around them. People’s perceptions of a given environment play a major role in access studies. Many social science studies, particularly in behavioral

geography, anthropology, and sociology have concentrated on the role of perception because it can have a profound effect on how people go about their everyday lives (Hawthorne and Kwan 2011, Curtis and Rees-Jones 1998, Freedman and Bell 2009, Richards and Smith 2007,

Sampson and Raudenbush 1999).

Perception in this case of food access deals with people’s perceived distance to the food resources nearest them as well as what is in their surrounding area or neighborhood. As noted by Hawthorne and Kwan (2011), most of the GIS studies in access and distance equate people’s accessibility with distance. By this it is meant that the closer a person might be to a

particular facility, the more accessibility there is. But often people’s perceptions are inaccurate, leading them to believe resources are inaccessible. Studies have shown that participants are more likely to perceive areas, such as neighborhoods and activity space—such as their work environment, as larger than they actually are and generally have imprecise perceptions of what is around them (Caspi et al. 2012, Crawford et al. 2014, Horner and Wood 2014, Festinger 1962). Additionally, Caspi et al. (2012) find that a person’s food access tends to be the result of perception and not fact. Many residents in poorer neighborhoods are not aware of the proximity of food retailers (LeClair and Askan 2014) and could in turn be missing out on opportunities to access food. Another factor to consider is perception of safety. People’s

perceptions of neighborhood safety affect their interaction within the area. If people feel unsafe in a particular neighborhood and have an increased fear of crime associated with a particular area, they likely avoid these areas (Kawachi et al 1997, Acuña-Rivera, Brown, and Uzzell 2014, Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997).

Barnes et al. (2015) performed a study of the relationship between perceived and GIS- based presence of retail food outlets and examined the role of perception in relation to what retail food outlets people perceived were in their neighborhood. The research was geared toward finding out to what extent individuals were aware of the presence of food stores in their neighborhood and to determine if their perceptions were accurate. The methodological

approach was GIS-based though these examinations were not performed in an area classified as a food desert; it included urban and suburban areas an 8-county section of South Carolina containing residents of various socio-demographic groups. While the research was not food desert specific, it points out the issue of people perceiving things differently in their different environments, many times to their detriment.

Caspi et al. (2012) examined low-income residents’ perceived and objective measures of distance between their residence and supermarkets. Their examinations were of residents living within and beyond walking distance to the nearest supermarket, in turn trying to determine if this had any bearing on their fruit and vegetable intake. While surveys were provided in order to obtain much of the information, the concentration was on low-income residents living in the Boston, Massachusetts area, to later determine if they lived within a food desert—which they did not. Regarding perceived distance, results were inconclusive as other factors were thought to have some influence, such as neighborhood environmental factors and individual preference or tastes.

Chen and Kwan (2015) examined the neglected aspect of contextual influences on people’s eating habits as well as interpersonal communications in individual experiences and propose a geographic problem: the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) (initially discussed by Kwan, 2012). UGCoP refers to the fact that findings about the effects of area- based attributes (e.g. density of fast food outlets) on individual behaviors or health outcomes could be affected by how contextual units are geographically delineated (p. 1734). Put more simply, there are uncertainties in many datasets regarding the different factors of space and time in a person’s behaviors in travel; that one must consider that there could be a number of other factors that affect a person’s routine. This is essentially examining the various contexts that are associated with a person obtaining food.

Two types of uncertainty are involved in accessing contextual influences on people’s food: 1) the traditional conceptualization of the food environment is very different from that which individuals actually experience and 2) food-related activities are affected by time constraints, including the flexibility of individuals’ scheduling of activities and the temporal

availability of food outlets (Chen and Kwan 2015). The notion here is that one cannot merely examine where a person lives in relation to food sources and make conclusions about the places they shop because other factors come into play that are not seen by just examining the generalized variables. Generalization of the food environment, which comes about from this type of research, i.e., asking the participant to indicate their food accessibility, is a problem because it does not accurately capture the geographic areas and boundaries in which a participant shops for food. This is similar to Widener et al.’s study (2013) in which they call for more attention to be focused on routines around the work route, not just the home. Chen and Kwan (2015:1734) and Widener et al. (2013) highlight a valid point in noting that

quantifying non-spatial mediators of food access is more difficult because the exact geographic context in which food is procured cannot be precisely delineated. However, their research still does not take that step further to include participants in the food access research, it is mainly a commentary or call for attention on the limitations of this type of research. Much of the previous food desert and food access research has not adequately taken into account this ecological fallacy. By neglecting to ask individual participants questions about where they specifically access their food, it is erroneous to assume that everyone in the same

neighborhood would shop at the same stores. By interviewing individual participants about where they shop I will be avoiding this ecological fallacy.