How do we conceptualise geographical linkages in statistical analyses? Identifying explicit and implicit understandings of spatial weights in planning

提交的提案概述了一个全面了解空间权重概念的项目。空间权重用于规划和相关的空间学科，以使统计分析中的空间关联正式化和可操作性。因此，它们在循证规划和空间观察的方法论程序中发挥着重要作用，并对预期分析结果有很大影响。后者最终被纳入规划过程，证明了对空间权重有一个坚实的概念理解的重要性。虽然空间权重的许多技术特性已经被很好地理解，但对研究人员对形式化空间关系的预期含义的全面理解仍然缺乏。权重是否代表了空间相互作用的潜力？他们是空间接近的典范吗？它们是否反映了外部环境被动地赋予空间相似性的倾向？到目前为止，这些水平的含义还没有被很好地理解，而且在已发表的研究实践中往往仍然是隐含的。这种理解对于全面理解分析结果并以有意义和知情的方式将其纳入规划进程至关重要。这就是拟议中的项目的用武之地。拟议的项目追求三个目标：(1)确定对空间权重的共存概念理解，(2)了解研究人员如何创建和使用空间权重，以及(3)全面了解空间权重概念理解的历史谱系。目标1是通过系统回顾和定性分析相结合的策略，从学术文章中提取已发表的对空间权重的理解。为实现目标2，选定的作者将接受面谈。将使用叙事分析对转录后的访谈进行定性分析，以更好地理解选择空间权重的基本决策过程。关于目标3，将对审查中确定的文献语料库的引文网络进行定量和定性分析，包括利用时间层面。因此，所有工作方案和目标都是相互关联的。预期的结果有可能缓解方法学规范问题，使空间权重在实证应用中更容易理解和更有说服力，并有助于更好地理解我们作为规划社区如何在我们的量化方法中表示空间。

The submitted proposal outlines a project to gain a comprehensive conceptual understanding of spatial weights. Spatial weights are used in planning and related spatial disciplines to formalise and operationalise spatial associations in statistical analyses. As such, they play an important role in methodological procedures of evidence-based planning and spatial observation and have a strong influence on expected analytical results. The latter eventually feed into planning processes, demonstrating the importance of a solid conceptual understanding of spatial weights. While many technical properties of spatial weights are well understood, a comprehensive understanding of the researchers' intended meanings of formalised spatial relationships is still lacking. Do weights represent the potential for spatial interaction? Are they models for spatial proximity? Do they reflect the propensity of similarities in space given passively by external circumstances? These levels of meaning are not well understood to date and often remain implicit in published research practice. Such understanding is essential to comprehensively apprehend analysis results and to feed them into planning processes in a meaningful and informed way. This is where the proposed project comes in. The proposed project pursues three goals: (1) to identify co-existing conceptual understandings of spatial weights, (2) to understand how researchers create and use spatial weights, and (3) to gain a comprehensive picture of the historical lineages of conceptual understandings of spatial weights. Objective 1 is pursued by extracting published understandings of spatial weights from scholarly articles through a systematic review combined with a qualitative analysis strategy. To achieve objective 2, selected authors will be interviewed in person. The transcribed interviews will be qualitatively analysed using narrative analysis to better understand the underlying decision-making process for selecting spatial weights. Regarding objective 3, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the citation network of the literature corpus identified in the review will be conducted, including exploiting the temporal dimension. All work packages and objectives are thus interlinked. The expected results have the potential to alleviate methodological specification problems, make spatial weights easier to understand and more defensible in empirical applications, and contribute to a better understanding of how we as a planning community represent space in our quantitative methods.