Asthma: The Connection Between Population Density and Air Quality : Update 4: Reclassification of Rasters

Now that I have been able to convert all of my shapefiles to rasters, I will begin to reclassify each of the four variables so that I can assign each of them weights and eventually use a raster calculator to find areas within the state of California where asthma sufferers are at higher and lower risks of complications with their condition. For ozone, areas that have lower numbers of ozone exceedance will be favored over those with more exceedances because higher levels of ozone may aggravate asthma symptoms due to poorer air quality. Areas of higher income will be favored over areas of lower incomes because people with more money are more likely to be able to afford health insurances or the hospital bills incurred. Counties with higher population densities are more likely to have more hospitals and because I did not see a correlation between higher population densities and ozone exceedances, I will not have to take the air quality into considereation. Before reclassifying hospitals, I will use the euclidean distance tool. In studies, it has been shown that the closer the distance to the hospital, the less likely the patients condition will be fatal. In the study that I gathered the information from, it was shown that hospitals within a distance of 6 miles have the lowest mortality rates with lower levels of survival at any distance larger than this. Specifically, 12.5 miles was considered to be a far distance. Therefore, any distance 6 miles and under was considered to be favorable. The classifications were scaled from 1-3 with three being the most favorable and one being the least favorable. Least favorable conditions are represented by lighter shades of blue while most favorable conditions are represented by darker shades of blue. I have attached my initial reclassification results below. The next step will be to assign each of the variables a weight and use the raster calculator to determine areas of high and low risk.