3. Data Collection

Finding Data....
After I decided on factors and constraints, I had to think of where to get data from. The "2001 Census Data" were not available at that point and as the refugees arrived in 1999, I could not use census data from 1996 in order to get information about them. So I had to rely on information I could get from Kathy Sherell, who, as a graduate student at the SFU, works on "The Impact of Place on Refugee Settlement in British Columbia". Due to her research in Abbotsford, Burnaby, Chilliwack and Surrey, I decided to chose these four cities for my project. Unfortunately she is still in the middle of her research, so, by the time I had to finish my project, I was not able to get information about Burnaby and Chilliwack. Also concerning the factors I was restricted in my analysis, because I could not get information about the former employment of the refugees, due to security policies. I had to assume, in order to do my analysis, that the average former employment was in the sector educational services.

So I received the following information.... about a small data sample of 6 refugees from Surrey and 15 refugees from Abbotsford :


But the information about the cities, I could still derive from the 1996 census. I received the data from Rob Fiedler, who created a CD-ROM with the 1996 census data. From this CD, I chose the following data sets for the cities Abbotsford, Burnaby, Chilliwack, Surrey and Kelowna, Port Hardy and Prince George on the "CDS-level"
(at the time I decided on the cities Abbotsford, Burnaby, Chilliwack and Surrey , I did not know, what information was available for which city, so I had to get data for all of them):


Data Conversion and Manipulation
After I converted the tabular digital data (file name kosovo_csd) from a GEODATABASE to a table DBF-file and the vector digital data from a GEODATABASE into a SHAPEFILE in ArcCatalog, I could start to work with the census information in ArcView. For my final documentation of the result, I also extracted a map of British Columbia from the SIS Drive (under : S:\GIS Data\Census\Canada 1996 Census Spatial Data\Spatial Data\Digital Catrographic Files\PROV\CSD) named GCSD059B.zip and unzippped the file. After that I converted the file from E00-format to a SHAPEFILE in order to be able to open it up in ArcView.

First of all, I manipulated the attribute database in EXCEL, as I needed certain data in percentage. There I calculated some of the factors to get percentages and came up with the following results for five of the seven cities ( I will not present Burnaby and Chilliwack here, because I could not include them in my analysis):
                                                   

                                                Table: Cities where Refugees are settled

ABBOTSFORD
unemployment rate
 		10%
average gross rent in CAN Dollars
 		684
percentage of population 30-34 years old
 		8%
percentage of labour force working in educational services
 		6%
percentage of visible minorities
 		15%
percentage of Serbian population
 		<0.1%

SURREY
unemployment rate
 		10%
average gross rent in CAN Dollars 756
percentage of population 30-34 years old
 		9%
percentage of labour force working in educational services
 		5%
percentage of visible minorities
 		3%
percentage of Serbian population 0.2%





Table: Potential Cities for Resettlement
KELOWNA
unemployment rate
 10%
average gross rent in CAN Dollars 696
percentage of population 30-34 years old
 7%
percentage of labour force working in educational services
 6%
percentage of visible minorities
 5%
percentage of Serbian population <0.1%

PORT HARDY
unemployment rate
 9%
average gross rent in CAN Dollars 588
percentage of population 30-34 years old
 9%
percentage of labour force working in educational services
 9%
percentage of visible minorities
 6%
percentage of Serbian population 0.7%

PRINCE GEORGE
unemployment rate
 12%
average gross rent in CAN Dollars 639
percentage of population 30-34 years old
 9%
percentage of labour force working in educational services
 8%
percentage of visible minorities
 5%
percentage of Serbian population <0.1%


How did I calculate....

1. Percentage of population 30-34 years old:
As I knew that the average age of the refugees living in Abbotsford and Surrey was 34 years, I decided to include this factor to see how the refugees would fit in a community due to its average age. I calculated the percentage of this group, by using the values for...


2. Percentage of labour force working in educational services:
As I assumed that most of the refugees worked in educational sevices before, I also included this factor. To see what kind of job opportunities the refugees could have in the cities, I needed to know how many people living there were actually working in that field. I calculated the percentage, by using the values for...


3. Percentage of visible minorities:
I wanted to include this value as a factor, and later see whether there is a large visible minority population in Abbotsford and Surrey, in order to decide how important this factor is for the resettlement. I calculated the percentage, by using the values for...



4. Percentage of Serbian population:
I thought about including this factor to see whether there is a relationship between Serbian communities in the cities of Abbotsford and Surrey and the resettlement of Kosovo/ar refugees there. 
 I calculated the percentage, by using the values for...
To calculate the percentage for these factors is problematic, because there was no "relating" total population given in the census data to calculate the values for Serbian total responses with, so I needed to calculate these values with the total population (100% data), which might have resulted in an inaccurate percentages.

I did not calculate the remaining two values, because the unemployment rate was already given in percentage and the average gross rent I will later group in real numbers .




1.project introduction
4.Methodology 6.Methodological and Operational problems
2.Conceptual idea
5.Spatial analysis BACK to main page/
INDEX



back next