ESRA 2025 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Data integration of social indicators from surveys and social media content with geospatial context variables has rapidly progressed in the last years. Applications in the social sciences are manifold and cover issues such as conflict and migration, political participation, environmental attitudes, and inequality. Geospatial approaches allow researchers to introduce new perspectives in explaining societal processes, stress the local in questions of global relevance, and extend the potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research. To further progress the data integration based on spatial identifiers, advances are required in several key aspects: 1. High-quality georeferenced survey datasets are needed to expand the pool of linkable social indicators; 2. Social scientists require easier access to georeferenced context variables; 3. Similarly, linking processes need to be simplified and standardized. These steps are crucial for this line of research but bring their own challenges in terms of data quality and fit-for-purpose of the respective datasets to be linked, as well as pitfalls in the linking process itself. Therefore, this session will provide a platform to address these potentials as well as barriers in detail. It collects contributions that aim to advance geospatial social research and is open to empirical, methodological, data-focused, and conceptual papers. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- New methods and applications of linking survey and spatial data
- Utilization of novel sources of spatial data to integrate into survey research and answer social science questions
- Quality assurance of the data integration process and resulting data
- Applications and real-world examples integrating survey data with big spatial data, earth observation data, or other small-scale spatial data