Lowering Barriers to Incorporating Geospatial Data into Social Science Research: The National Neighborhood Data Archive

Research in the social sciences and public health has shed light on the many influences of the physical, built, and social environment on health and wellbeing. Increasingly, researchers are turning to geospatial data sources to measure these phenomena. Researchers exploring social science questions about place are experts in their fields, but may be novice users of GIS tools and technologies. They may face many challenges when working with geospatial data, including: lack of access to geospatial datasets, a need for large amounts of storage space and computing power, and a steep learning curve for the tools and programming languages used to work with geospatial data.

The National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) aims to address these challenges for users in the United States by providing geographic information in a simpler, easy-to-use, and publicly available format. NaNDA is an open data repository. It was created to facilitate research on the relationship between neighborhoods and health, especially within the context of large federally funded surveys and cohort studies. NaNDA reduces barriers to incorporating spatial data into social science research in three ways. First, NaNDA makes the data available in familiar tabular formats that can easily be linked to other data sources about individuals and communities. Second, NaNDA data promotes reproducibility and speeds up the research process by making the finished version of measures available instead of multiple users having to create the same measures from scratch. Third, NaNDA data is both publicly available for anyone to download from ICPSR, and increasingly available at the point of use in other enclaves, such as the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA) and the Michigan Medicine DataDirect portal. For these reasons, NaNDA serves as a model for geographic data services of the future.