My project seems to suggest that the GVRD is considered a
fairly
healthy place to live. The main areas where people live received high
health index scores and places where population was sparse received low
scores. As long as these areas with lower scores do not become
residential, the people of the GVRD seem to live in healthy
environments.
Of course this is just one approach on defining the level
of health of the environment. Others may consider my factors to be
unimportant, or may have felt I left out other factors that are more
imperative to environmental health. Some sources of error could have
been from the assumptions I made or the factor weighting of my multiple
MCE maps. I definitely feel like if I had lowered the maximum walking
limit to something like 800m, I would have had much more deviation of
the MCE maps. There are many reasons why some people may prefer to walk
less or more. It could all depend on their age, the current weather or
the reliabilty of the transit system. My decision to choose 1600m as
the maximum walking distance definitely played a huge role in my end
results. I believe a change in the maximum walking distance would
change the end results more drastically than changing the weighting
factors. As explained at the end of 'Results 1'; all the factors
are likely to be close to each other, so changing the factors would not
change the end results. Another important assumption made was that
people would naturally choose the closest source of food. Of course
this is not always with everybody, I know personally I would take a
longer trip just to get fast food even if there is a nearby grocery
store. This assumption is also open to debate and very subjective.
There are other areas where error could have been brought into my
model; but I believe the choice of the factors, maximum walking
distance, and the assumption that people choose where they eat
according to distance were the main sources of error.
Lastly, I think it would have been more informative to do
additional analyses after the creation of the MCE maps. I personally
only looked where children, elderly, and lower household income
families lived. Just by looking at these three groups would not be
enough to conclude anything. Possibly analyzing unemployment rates,
education level, density of ethnicities may answer some questions.
Unfortunately with the time frame I was only able to look at these
three groups. Clearly, additional analyses may result in interesting
outcomes something I may be interested in doing in the future.