Geographically Weighted Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (GW2SFCA) method: Spatial Accessibility to Preventive Cares in Florida, USA.

Abstract

Spatial accessibility has been well advocated for measuring to what extent people can easily access a particular service of interest quantitatively. The results from measuring spatial accessibility help policy practitioners and decision-makers to make decisions about spatial allocations and distributions of services of interest (e.g., hospitals, physicians). Particularly, a Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) method has been widely used to measure spatial accessibility due to its advantages of considering demands, supplies, and traffic together. However, it is inevitable to have uncertainty derived from obtaining datasets. Therefore, it would be interesting to validate the results from the 2SFCA method while investigating the distance-decay functions embedded in the 2SFCA method. To this end, this study explores the empirical-based spatial accessibility to validate the results from the 2SFCA method. Specifically, we measure spatial accessibility to preventive care in Florida, USA, and compared the results from the 2SFCA method based on the distance-decay function and the geographically weighted 2SFCA (GW2SFCA) method based on the survey. The findings from our study highlight the importance of empirically collected data when measuring spatial accessibility.