This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate food access and food security issues by assessing how people's daily activities, the spatial and temporal dimensions of their urban trip-making, and their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics affect the ways food is accessed by different populations. Special attention will be focused on the ability of low-income and disadvantaged populations to access food and nutrition-assistance services. The project will provide new knowledge regarding the geography of food access, time geography, and location science by providing a new perspective for better understanding the complexity of food access that explicitly incorporates travel patters with socioeconomic characteristics rather than relying on more traditional, simplistic measures that focused on spatial proximity and distance between homes and food stores. The project will provide new insights into travel-related issues associated with access to food and nutrition-assistance services for the low-income population, the elderly, and other disadvantaged groups with special needs, and the new spatial optimization model will contribute to the literature in location science that largely has focused on the spatial context and ignored the temporal variation of supply and demand across space. The project will yield a more suitable planning mechanism for service and facility planning that incorporates the spatial and temporal patterns of the population demand. The project's emphasis on food access for low-income and other disadvantaged populations will offer insights to agencies, groups, and policy makers seeking to improve access and service to food. Because the doctoral student is working with a local government agency, she will make readily accessible models and findings that can help the agency determine the best sites and time windows for providing food and nutrition assistance. Although this project is being conducted in Tucson, Arizona, project findings and outcomes will be adaptable for many other settings. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
During the course of this project, the doctoral student will investigate how people's decisions about whether, where, and when to obtain food are affected by their daily activities and travel patterns. She will examine the space-time access patterns of low-income population for food-assistance services, and she will compare them with the food-access patterns of the general population. She also will develop and test new models that incorporate people's daily travel patterns into planning for food and nutrition assistance. She will use a unique household travel dataset with detailed space-time travel activities as well as data on emergency food services sponsored by The Emergency Food Assistance Program, a federally sponsored program that helps supplement the diets of low-income population in order to relieve hunger on a short-term basis. The student will conduct questionnaires, interviews, and focus group studies at diverse food-access points to identify travel patterns and the needs of the disadvantaged populations. In the final stage of the project, she will develop spatial optimization models will be developed that incorporate travel dynamics into service-facility planning.
