Effective Maps, Easily Done: Visualizing Geo-Psychological Differences Using Distance Weights

Psychologists of many subfields are becoming increasingly interested in the geographical distribution psychological phenomena. An integral part this new stream geo-psychological studies is to visualize spatial distributions phenomena maps. However, most psychologists not trained visualizing data. As a result, almost all existing rely on basic mapping technique: color-coding disaggregated data (i.e., grouping individuals into predefined units and then out average scores across these units). Although technique wrong, it often leaves unleveraged potential effectively patterns. The aim tutorial introduce an alternative, easy-to-use distance-based weighting calculating area estimates that represent distance-weighted averages measurement locations). We outline idea explain how implement so effective for research. Using large-scale mental-health from United States ( N = 2,058,249), we empirically demonstrate may complement commonly used technique. provide fully annotated R code open access our analyses.