Hand, C.L., Rudman, D.L., Huot, S., Gilliland, J.A. and Pack, R.L. (2018) ‘Toward understanding person–place transactions in neighborhoods: A qualitative-participatory geospatial approach’, The Gerontologist, 58(1), pp. 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnx064.

Hand and colleagues develop a participatory geospatial method for studying person–place relations as transactions rather than one-directional environmental effects. Their key contribution is to combine situated qualitative inquiry with geospatial techniques so that meanings attached to streets, routes, services and neighbourhood features can be registered alongside their locations. The method is particularly useful where conventional interviews fail to verbalise the practical, affective or habitual dimensions of place. Rather than treating neighbourhoods as bounded exposure zones, the approach understands them through lived interactions, movement and interpretation. Its conceptual operation is therefore relational: environments shape possibilities, but participants also select, reinterpret and transform the significance of environmental features through everyday practice. The bridge to urban research is substantial because it joins participatory methods, qualitative GIS and environmental gerontology without reducing experience to coordinates. It offers a model for spatial evidence in which geolocation increases specificity while participant interpretation retains epistemic authority.