期刊名称：Human Geographies : Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography
印刷版ISSN：1843-6587
电子版ISSN：2067-2284
出版年度：2013
卷号：7
期号：2
页码：5-13
DOI：10.5719/hgeo.2013.72.5
出版社：University of Bucharest
摘要：Social scientists investigating how context varies by geographical location and/or how macro‐level phenomenon affects individual outcome s often make use of U.S. Census Bureau Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files where micro‐ units can only be geographically located to Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) polygons. Most spatial analysis investiga‐ tions with PUMAs ignore the fact that many of them are multipart polygons—spatially separated polygons that share the same attribute and are stored as a single feature in a vector file. We briefly discuss the theoretical premises of how geo‐ graphical boundaries are created for macro units and investigate the quantity, de gree, and location of PUMA fragmenta‐ tion. We argue that the basic contiguity principle (the assum ption that spatial analysis uses polygon centroids for solid and contiguous geographic units) in spatial dependence analysis is being violated with many PUMAs in the U.S. mainland— where Texas, California, Tennessee, and Illinois merit special attention. Future research should outline a method for han‐ dling multipart polygons in spatial and hierarchical analyses
