Throughout all sections we have attempted to introduce classic articles as well as contemporary studies. This section is not meant to be exhaustive but rather to indicate how some concepts, measures, data, and methods have been used by sociologists, criminologists, and demographers during their research. The second half of this article provides an explicit focus on spatial approaches within specific areas of sociological inquiry, including crime, demography, education, health, inequality, and religion.

First, following a general overview of spatial concepts and spatial thinking in sociology, we introduce the field of spatial analysis focusing on easily available textbooks (introductory, handbooks, and advanced), journals, data, and online instructional resources. This Oxford Bibliographies article has two main parts. Indeed, a prerequisite for spatial analysis is the availability of information on locations (i.e., places) and the attributes of those locations (e.g., poverty rates, educational attainment, religious participation, or disease prevalence). Given all of these considerations, researchers are continuously developing new ways to harness and analyze geo-referenced data. Indeed, research on race/ethnic segregation and other forms of social stratification as well as research on human health and behavior problems, such as obesity, mental health, risk-taking behaviors, and crime, depend on the collection and analysis of individual- and contextual-level (geographic area) data across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the addition of a spatial perspective, especially in the social and health sciences, and in part this growth has been driven by the ready availability of georeferenced or geospatial data, and the tools to analyze them: geographic information science (GIS), spatial analysis, and spatial statistics.

Socio spatial dialectic definition