Tracking Cleveland’s “Food Deserts”
Gwendolyn Donley (Population and Quantitative Health Sciences)
Freedman Student Fellow 2019-2020
Gwendolyn Donley, BA, BS, MsC is a Pre-Doctoral Scholar, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Her grant research will focus on Cleveland as a case study for nutrition inequity. Nearly 60% of the population lives in “food deserts,” or areas that lack access to grocery stores and healthy food options. By creating spatial video geonarratives (SVGs) to map and analyze perceptions of space and integrating them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, this project will help identify key environmental variables and provide qualitative context to quantitative data layers. This is the first study to use SVGs to understand perceptions of food availability. Objective and subjective measures of spatial patterning and narratives of these local environments will reveal more precise levers to guide future interventions aimed at improving diet and reducing health inequities.
