Abstract
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic extends beyond the health and well-being of the general population. The social, emotional, and economic lives of individuals and their communities are being fully reshaped by this public health crisis. The central goal of this chapter is to illustrate the value of a geographic lens for understanding these multidimensional social, economic, and psychological impacts. Drawing on survey data collected in mid-to-late March from over 10,000 individuals with support from the National Science Foundation, we describe how spatial processes are a critical piece of understanding the current public health crisis in the social sciences. In particular, we describe how social problems—including COVID-19 fear, depressive and anxiety symptomatology, suicide ideation, and food insecurity—cluster in geographic space, as well as how responses by individuals to these social outcomes is driven in part by the geographic distribution of COVID-19 itself. Individuals do not exist in a vacuum—nor do their reactions to and recovery from public health crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, the social actions people undertake during this pandemic follow similar epidemiological processes as the disease itself. Understanding such social behavior requires spatial tools and frameworks to leverage alongside the individual and contextual analyses that constitute the bulk of research to-date.
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Drawve, G., Harris, C.T., Fitzpatrick, K.M. (2021). Individual, Context, and Space: Using Spatial Approaches for Understanding Unequal Social and Psychological Fallout of COVID-19. In: Shaw, SL., Sui, D. (eds) Mapping COVID-19 in Space and Time. Human Dynamics in Smart Cities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72808-3_3
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