UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON YEAR 3, SEMESTER 2
School of Geography 2003-04
GEOG3025 CENSUS AND NEIGHBOURHOOD ANALYSIS
ASSIGNMENTS LEADING UP TO COURSEWORK PART 1
Students are expected to work through the online materials provided through the course Blackboard site. The assignments are activities designed to assist you in covering the course material and some of them provide essential elements (such as obtaining registrations and retrieving data) without which the assessed coursework cannot be completed. Formative assessments are provided through the interactive questions and quizzes embedded within these materials and through online discussion. If you have specific questions or difficulties you should email the course tutor Summative assessment is through two pieces of coursework (each worth 25% of the course total) and a conventional unseen written examination (worth 50% of the course total).
Students are particularly reminded of the University’s strict policy on plagiarism.
Assignment 1 (Target Mon 9 February)
Enrol for GEOG3025 on Blackboard site www.blackboard.soton.ac.ukand familiarise yourself with the layout of the resources provided.
If you do not already have an Athens ID and password, register yourself for these at https://subscribe.iss.soton.ac.uk/subscribe.html NB It may take up to 48 hours to activate your Athens account.
Use your Athens account to register yourself for access to data resources from the ESRC/JISC Census Programme at http://census.data-archive.ac.uk/
Complete the online census questionnaire in the Assignments area, following the instructions given. This will create a record for you in the class dataset which will be used later in the course.
Reflect on the ease with which you were able to interpret the census questionnaire and post your brief observations to the Census questionnaire discussion on Blackboard.
Assignment 2 (Target Mon 16 February)
Choose a neighbourhood with which you are familiar and produce a sketch map for your own reference in the later assignments. This should be done without reference to any formal background mapping.
Compare your concept of this neighbourhood with at least two alternative conceptual frameworks: how do they relate to your experience?
Post your observations to the discussion board, in particular noting how you have chosen boundaries, and what you consider to be the most distinctive features of the neighbourhood. Compare your observations with those posted by other students.
Assignment 3 (Target date Mon 23 February)
Work through the ONS Beginners’ guide to UK geography at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/beginners_guide.asp
Attempt to identify where your chosen neighbourhood falls within the principal geography systems. Once you understand these systems from the above resource, one of the most helpful ways of finding the area in which you are interested is to use the ‘summary statistics for your area’ option on the Neighbourhood Statistics website at http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk
Identify the appropriate geographical area names and codes which will provide a reference to information about your chosen neighbourhood, using the smallest geographical scale for which you can obtain information. Depending on the size of your neighbourhood this will inevitably involve some aggregation and approximation between published areal units and your chosen boundaries. For example you may need to add several census output areas together, but find that your neighbourhood falls across the boundary between two local authorities.
Assignment 4 (Target date Mon 1 March)
NB you must have registered for access to resources from the ESRC/JISC Census Programme (Assignment 1) in order to complete Assignments 4 and 5.
Work through CHCC Unit 1 ‘A quick introduction to the census’ and Unit 4 ‘Census 2001: the enumeration process’. It is recommended that instead of using the ‘test your knowledge’ questions in Unit 1, you try the separate quiz provided once you have finished the unit, which contains some improved and updated questions. The practical assignments associated with these units are optional, and are not required or assessed as part of this course although they may assist you in learning aspects with which you are unfamiliar. You should use the Neighbourhood Statistics Service to locate information that particularly characterises your chosen neighbourhood. Comparisons with national means can be very helpful in this context.
Assignment 5 (Target date Mon 8 March)
Use Casweb to obtain additional data for your chosen neighbourhood. You may wish to add data from 1991 if you are aware of significant changes during the 1990s. Casweb makes it easy to retrieve data for several areas at a time, such as a group of OAs or EDs and to retrieve several variables from different tables. There is a CHCC Unit 2 ‘An introduction to Casweb’ but the GEOG3025 PowerPoint presentation contains a step-by-step guide to using Casweb that reflects recent changes to the software to accommodate 2001 census data.
Coursework 1 (Deadline Mon 8 March)
Provide a brief description of your chosen neighbourhood, highlighting those concepts from the literature which are particularly helpful in defining this particular area.
Use census and neighbourhood statistics retrieved from the Neighbourhood Statistics Service and Casweb as appropriate to write an area profile, outlining the key social and economic attributes that characterise your neighbourhood, with particular reference to variables that illustrate the neighbourhood concepts suggested by the literature.
Provide an assessment of the extent to which it has been possible to obtain official statistics which match with the neighbourhood that you originally defined.
Guide length: 1500 words