USING SPATIAL SEGREGATION MEASURES IN GIS AND STATISTICAL MODELING PACKAGES

It is generally known that many traditional measures of segregation ca nnot distinguish different spatial population patterns. Several spatia l measures of segregation have been proposed to overcome this problem, but these spatial measures are difficult to use because they require explicit spatial information and complex computation. This paper shows that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can provide the spatial inf ormation required by these indices and that statistical packages can o ffer the complex computation functions needed to calculate the indices . We use ARC/INFO as the GIS package and S-Plus as the statistical pac kage to demonstrate how spatial segregation indices can be calculated by combining the capabilities of these two types of systems.