MIS Journal Review Nileena Babu, F10093

JOURNAL REVIEW

Article: ‘Using Geographic Information Systems and Local Food Store Data in California’s Low-Income
Neighborhoods to Inform Community Initiatives and Resources’
By: Alyssa Ghirardelli, RD, MPH, Valerie Quinn, MEd, and Susan B. Foerster, RD, MPH

This journal talks about how Geographical Information System (GIS) and local food store
data was effectively used in examining the obesity conditions and health situations in the low
income neighbourhoods of California.

The journal gives a fairly good idea as to how well GIS proved to be helpful in the task by
cutting down costs and improve speed of operation.

A Geographic Information System is a map based data base that stores information about the
geographical spread of the place and various shops etc located in the area. With the help of
GIS and field surveys it was possible to find out the condition of various food stores in low
incomes areas of the country.

The author has given quite a good picture about how GIS has greatly aided in the survey done
to study and control the condition of obesity in the state of California.

A social marketing initiative in California has a network of nearly 7 million households under
the poverty level. This network helps retailers to promote fruits and vegetable consumption
by the households. This network also has more than 100 geocoded database layers that have
online interactive mapping capability. This database, along with the maps, enables the
contractors to locate those areas that require training on proper nutrition. It helped the local
healthcare departments to analyse the obesity condition in the neighbourhoods.

According to the author, GIS helps in providing cheap and faster way to examine the
geographic condition of a place with respect to the availability of food. The drawback of this
system is that it just shows what food type is present were, it does not show the availability or
the price of the food available.

Studies show that proximity to super markets and healthy eating have a very high
correlation ship with each other. With this in mind, lower income neighbourhood where
examined to see the proximity of supermarkets or grocery stores to that area.

GIS mapped various large super markets and grocery stores and fast foods in an area and
transport and access to or from them. GIS also provided a visual image of the food
MIS Journal Review Nileena Babu, F10093

availability in an area. People were trained to interpret these maps with the help of softwares
like ArcIMS 9.2 and ArcSDE 9.2.

With all these available data, surveys were conducted in the required stores, and food items
were checked so as to rate the store according to its quality. It was rated based on various
criteria and was given a final score in the end that showed whether the store had healthy food
or not.

The author gives the reader a fairly good insight to the way the survey was conducted and the
use of Geographical Information System and other software databases and tools that helped
in carrying out the process. The result of the study was also given in the journal showing how
the quality of the stores differed at various geographical locations.