© 2006 American Public Health Association DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.078857
Seth Spielman is with the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, New York, NY, and is a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow in Geographic Information Science at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Seth Spielman, MS, 400 Avery Hall, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, New York, NY 10027 (e-mail: ses89@columbia.edu).
There is clearly a need to understand neighborhood food environments and how they contribute to behavior. "Clustering of Fast-Food Restaurants Around Schools: A Novel Application of Spatial Statistics to the Study of Food Environments"1 is an interesting approach to understanding this important need. However, the article raises a number of methodological concerns about the use of spatial statistics in urban environments.
First and foremost is that the planar K function, the statistical technique used by Austin et al., may not be appropriate for data derived from street addresses. The K function used employs an "as the crow flies" measure of
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