• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.40-53
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• 2013

Most of the existing domestic studies to identify the distribution of longevity population and influencing factors oriented confirmatory approach. Furthermore, most of the studies in this research topic simply have used their own definition of spatial unit of analysis or employed arbitrary spatial units of analysis according to data availability. These research approaches can not sufficiently reflect the spatial characteristic of longevity phenomenon and exposed to the Modifiable Aerial Unit Problem(MAUP). This research performed the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis(ESDA) to identify the spatial autocorrelation of the distribution of longevity population and investigated whether the modifiable areal unit problem in the aspect of scale effect using spatial population data in Korea. We used Si_Gun_Gu and Eup_Myeon_Dong as two different spatial units of regional longevity indicators measured. Then, we applied Getis-Ord Gi* to investigate the existence of spatial hot spots and cold spots. The results from our analysis show that there exist statistically significant spatial autocorrelation and spatial hot spots and cold spots of regional longevity at both Si_Gun_Gu and Eup_Myeon_Dong levels. This result implies that the modifiable areal unit problem does exist in the studies of spatial patterns of longevity population distribution. The demand for longevity researches would be increased inevitably. In addition, there were apparent differences for the global spatial autocorrelation and local spatial cluster which calculated different spatial units such as Si_Gun_Gu and Eup_Myeon_Dong and this can be seen as scale effect of MAUP. The findings from our analysis show that any study in this topic can mislead results when the modifiable areal unit problem and spatial autocorrelation are not explicitly considered.