The 5X社区 Geographic Information System (GIS) Health & Hazards Lab is teaming up with the city of Akron, Ohio to better understand the impact violence has on children in the city. In doing so, the group is working together to discover, develop and deploy solutions to the violence.
Kent State鈥檚 GIS|Health and Hazards Lab started gathering and mapping the data three years ago through a partnership with Akron Children鈥檚 Hospital External Affairs, Injury Prevention & Safe Kids Summit County for a project known as Mapping and Spatial Analysis for Child Injury Surveillance. The university has also been gathering data from the Akron Police Department over the past six years. Together, the information is giving researchers a visual of where children are experiencing violence, what type of violence it is, and at what age it is happening. The goal is to identify community and household risks prior to a child ending up in the emergency department, and to identify those risks before the children enter the system.
鈥淎s geographers, we put data on maps,鈥 said Jacqueline Curtis, Ph.D., co-director of Kent State鈥檚 GIS|Health & Hazards Lab and assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. 鈥淔or this project, we want to take the data off, because every point represents a child of violence. We hope the map gets smaller and the hot spots disappear.鈥
The research is partially funded through the city of Akron and a grant from the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, as well as the Ohio Department of Health, Bureau of Healthy Ohio, Violence, and Injury Prevention Program, Akron Children鈥檚 Hospital, and Safe Kids Summit County. The research results are expected to help the group come up with solutions to target violence.
Learn more about the Kent State GIS|Health and Hazards Lab
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