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Replication Data for: Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing A New Measure of Context

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing A New Measure of Context
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/9XWGHN
 
Creator Bowers, Jake
Wong, Cara
Rubenson, Daniel
Fredrickson, Mark
Rundlett, Ashlea
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description To understand the relationship between place and politics, we must measure both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals. In this paper, we assess a new measure of mental-representation of geography, in which survey respondents draw their own local communities on maps and describe them. This mapping measure has been used in Canada, the UK, Denmark, and the U.S. so far. We use a panel study in Canada to present evidence that these maps are both valid and reliable measures of a personally relevant geographic area, laying the measurement groundwork for the growing number of studies using this technology. We hope to set efforts to measure ‘place’ for the study of context and politics on firmer footing. Our validity assessments show that individuals are thinking about people and places with which they have regular contact when asked to draw their communities. Our reliability assessments show that people can draw more or less the same map twice, even when the exercise is repeated months later. Finally, we provide evidence that the concept of community is a tangible consideration in the minds of ordinary citizens and is not simply a normative aspiration or motivation.
 
Subject Social Sciences
maps, political geography, context, Canada, community
 
Contributor Bowers, Jake