A spatial analyses of food insecurity and disability in the Southeast region of the United States

Abstract

Although food insecurity continues to be widely researched, the body of literature examining its relationship with disability remains under-studied. To advance this area, the present study investigated the spatial prevalence of food insecurity and disability by examining the Southeast region of the United States (i.e., Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee), an area with disproportionately high levels of both conditions. After collecting records from multiple sources to create a dataset containing health-oriented and physical environment variables, an exploratory mapping analyses was conducted. Results showed distinct high and low value patterns for both food insecurity and disability and the test of local coefficients confirmed geographic variability. To account for this spatial non-stationarity, geographically weighted regression (GWR) was implemented with the county as the unit of analysis. GWR estimates revealed that disability was positively associated with food insecurity but the association varied in magnitude across the Southeast region.

Keywords

• Food insecurity
• health geography
• population nutrition
• disability
• spatial methods
• population health