@marie_ahoi They should also have a plan in place for revisiting the spatial data when people move or the environment changes substantially. In our case we have 21 clinical centers all over the US and participants can drive in many, many miles for a study visit. If we'd planned ahead for this then we'd have spatial AND temporal exposure data since we're at 15 years of follow-up now, at least one Census recalculation of ADI and rurality right? #COPD #COPDGene

@marie_ahoi I did my dissertation using spatial data but it involved mortality and in the US that's outside of IRB (for this analysis anyway). For our large study of #COPD ( #COPDGene ) though the participants are present and protected by #HIPPA so - higher standard. I think that going forward we'll pull all of the shape files, do all of our #kriging and other work before we even think about merging the spatial identifiers. Now what does THAT grant look like??!