Freedom from the tyranny of neighbourhood: Rethinking sociospatial context effects

Abstract

Theoretically, neighbourhood effects hold that, across scales and geographies, people's geographical surroundings may influence individual results. We contend that in order to escape the "tyranny" of the neighbourhood, researchers studying neighbourhood impacts should look at other methods of measuring people's broader socio-spatial environment, with an emphasis on the importance of the person. We investigate the geographical scopes of processes including neighbourhood effects and survey various theoretical and empirical methods concerning space and place from various fields. In the end, we propose a theorydriven data exploration approach that replaces data pragmatism with microgeographic data to operationalize sociospatial context.