Familiar Fieldwork - Human

Geographical Enquiry: Key Question

What is the impact of counter-urbanisation?

Aim

To investigate if Amersham on the Hill has been more impacted by counter-urbanisation than Holmer Green

Hypotheses

* Holmer Green has a higher environmental quality than Amersham on the Hill
* There will be busier traffic in Amersham on the Hill than Holmer Green
* There will be greater diversity of age ranges in Amersham on the Hill than in Holmer Green

Location

Two contrasting settlements:

* Amersham - population 14000, 27 miles from London, on the Metropolitan line
* Holmer Green - population 4000, historically agricultural, local businesses

Risks

Traffic, interacting with the general public

Method

Environmental quality surveys:

* Using a bi-polar scale we scored different characterisitics for the local area from 0-10. 0 being the most negative score and 10 was the most positive
* These included: Building upkeep, green space, paving and roads, litter, noise, number of people
* we went to 3 locations in each of the settlements to ensure that our results were not biased. It made sure that we visited different parts of the settlement to get an overview. This is called stratified sampling
* We wanted to see if the greater population size had reduced the environmental quality.
* We chose 6 factors as this would give us different environmental characteristics to look at

Evaluation of data collection - Environmental quality surveys

This is a subjective method as it is based on my opinion of this place. This may have led to it being inaccurate as others might have a different opinion. I could have made this less subjective by comparing my results to others in my group and collecting a mean total for each of the characterisitcs.