Defining Areas and Linking Geographical Data: An Example from New Zealand

This paper develops a match quality statistic to aid researchers in linking regional data that are available at inconsistent levels of aggregation. The match quality statistic developed in the paper allows researchers to make their own decisions regarding the trade-off between specificity and completeness when choosing a basis for linking such data. We illustrate this statistic with the example of a New Zealand labour economics research project that required different spatial data to be combined. A program to calculate the match quality statistic, coded as a Stata ado file, is available on request from the authors.

Citation

Grimes, Arthur, David C. Maré and Melanie Morten. 2009. "Defining areas and linking geographical data: an example from New Zealand," Population, Space and Place, 16:2, pp. 165-170.