SPATIAL ORDERING IN SOCIAL AREA TYPOLOGY

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide tentative evaluation of the general applicability of two statistics, the weighted mean areal center and standard distance, to the question of spatial ordering in social area analysis. More specifically, does the use of these statistics identify whether social phenomena tends to conform to either a concentric (doughnut) ring or a sector (pie-shaped) pattern? The weighted mean areal center is defined as the "balancing point" or "center of gravity" for a population distributed in twodimensions (x-y coordinates) which is comparable to the arithmetic mean of the conventional linear frequency distribution.' The descriptive spatial statistic, that is, standard distance, which is comparable to the standard deviation in one-dimension is designed to measure the average dispersion in distances of all points from the mean areal center.2