The cognitive process of wayfinding is necessarily situated in a social world, whether someone is traveling with another person to a shared destination or interpreting the physical traces of others’ activities to direct their travel. Wayfinding involves integrating multiple sources of information about the environment, one of which is the direct or indirect influence of the social context. The presented work expands our understanding of human navigation as it unfolds in a social context. I investigate pedestrian navigation by pairs of people (both stranger dyads and friend dyads) as well as individuals in an unfamiliar, real-world environment. In three studies, participants were asked to plan and enact a route between a given origin and destination. Each dyad or individual first devised a route using a map of the environment, then was taken to the environment and asked to navigate to the destination from memory alone. I video-recorded participants during both planning and navigation, using Conversation Analysis (CA) for the evaluation of social interaction. The complexity of human behavior in groups calls for such interdisciplinary methods of inquiry and approaches to understanding.

With these studies I examine explanations for successful route planning, spatial and social strategies employed during wayfinding, and sources of uncertainty in navigation. This includes differences between situated and prospective planning—participants often collaboratively adapt their route-following on the fly based on unexpected challenges. This research contributes to the understanding of how people encode and coordinate their spatial knowledge to solve the important problem of navigating through the environment. It has further implications for the design of navigation aids, expanding what we know about the practices of multiple people working in conjunction on a wayfinding task.

Previous research has indicated that the personality characteristics of individuals, as measured by the “Big Five” personality traits, are often spatially distributed within a population in non-random fashion. Although this phenomenon has been observed at between-country and sub-country (regional) scales of analysis, I advance this field of inquiry by investigating the presence of “personality regions” at a significantly smaller scale, specifically within the county of Santa Barbara, California. Through analysis of survey data collected from over 500 residents of the county, I determine that the county is regionalized non-randomly in terms of the Big Five trait openness. In addition, I find that the political attitudes individuals express, correlated to some extent with openness, are also distributed within the county in a non-random manner. I make novel use of an “a posteriori” approach in conjunction with regional optimization methods to identify and map meaningful, empirically derived regions across the county. The most notable regional division is between a higher openness/more politically liberal southeast and a lower openness/less politically liberal northwest (often referred to colloquially in the county as a South County/North County divide). This distinction is valid even when controlling for a range of socio-demographic variables. Living in more heavily urbanized areas is associated with greater neuroticism and political liberalism, but while this explains part of the major regional divide in the county, it does not explain all or even most of it. Using residential history data, I also test to see whether residents are more likely to “fit” regional personality and attitudinal norms with greater length of time spent living in the region, which would be indicative of an acculturation effect. However, I determine that length of time as a regional resident has no bearing on conformity to the norm, suggesting acculturation does not play a role in forming or maintaining a regional average personality. Finally, I find that being a political liberal is associated with a greater sense of identification with and attachment to Santa Barbara County, even when controlling for covariates. This suggests that individuals in the political majority are more likely to feel connected to the places in which they live.

The neighborhood has long been studied in such fields as geography, sociology, political science, and urban planning as a meaningful unit of analysis, with deep connections for residents and an ever-shifting form. This study expands on foundational research about geographic regions (particularly informal or vague cognitive regions), sense of place, and environmental and travel perception, and takes as its focal area the neighborhood of Koreatown in Los Angeles. By collecting information about residents’ individual attributes, their concepts of this neighborhood region, and their travel activity within the city, I elucidate how ideas about the neighborhood fit into theories about sense of place. My work additionally demonstrates the value of surveying residents about vague concepts of local regions, and ways in which to measure and express these ideas.

I conducted in-person surveys to explore the connection between residents’ cognitive boundaries of Koreatown, through drawn boundaries and explanations, and their behavior within the city of LA, represented by activity space measures. In doing so, I find ways in which respondents’ cognitive boundaries of the Koreatown neighborhood align with and differ from otherwise established definitions of Koreatown, presenting two methods of evaluating individual boundaries of a region. One of these ways of comparing polygons, the radial intersect method, is originally extended to the summary of multiple polygons. Collected temporary travel behavior of respondents provides a way of depicting respondents’ activity spaces in the LA region for comparison with their cognitive regions. Survey data is supplemented with socio-demographic data from the Census and field observations to contextualize these findings by looking at residential clustering and ethnic composition in the neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles region. My research makes an important contribution to our understanding of the urban neighborhood through an extensive analysis of a unique ethnic enclave from the perspective of local residents in one of the nation’s largest metropolises.

The intensity, frequency, duration, and spatial extent of weather and climate extremes are projected to experience changes. However, the impacts of such hazards are not straightforward. This issue is challenging mainly because natural hazards by themselves do not wholly explain the experienced impacts. Furthermore, the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change moves away from the idea of vulnerability in terms of a hazard’s outcome and takes an approach in which vulnerability consists of pre-existing conditions that are exacerbated by climate variability and/or change. This framework is closer to that of the disaster risk reduction community and introduces approaches where the focus is on understanding those social vulnerabilities.

This dissertation aims to enhance assessment tools that support the identification of those most vulnerable to climate hazards. Peruvian farmers from Puno are used as a case study, examined with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This dissertation presents three studies that aim to enhance social vulnerability assessments. The first study uses qualitative data: ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and local agencies reports. The other two studies used 22 quantitative indicators extracted from a dataset of over 200,000 farmers. The first of these two creates a composite index to explore social vulnerability at the farm, census unit, and municipality levels. The second quantitative study uses geons to create homogenous areas of vulnerability that do not necessarily correspond to administrative boundaries.

Results point to a need to improve social capital among farmers as well as our need to increase our understanding of local social networks among farmers. The research revealed concerns people have with indoor thermal comfort as well as challenges in predicting and reporting droughts in the region. Social vulnerability maps and reported impacts were spatially associated, especially when weather hazards were not extreme. As expected, spatial patterns fluctuated by aggregation levels. The census unit level revealed patterns following specific topographic features in Puno. Furthermore, this dissertation showed how qualitative and quantitative methods can build on each other to create a more comprehensive assessment. Results from the dissertation have the potential to serve as scaffolding for future adaptation strategies in Puno and, eventually, in other areas where agriculture provides people’s main livelihood.

When drawing boundaries of electoral districts, officials often try to respect communities of interest (COIs) by keeping them intact. COIs can be defined socioeconomically, such as an area where a particular ethnic group concentrates, or cognitively, such as a neighborhood or region that people commonly agree upon. My research focuses on the nature and scale of the latter type, called cognitive COIs. I investigate whether people conceive of different scales of cognitive COIs when they are exposed to different map extents of their local area. If they are indeed different, that would point to the existence of different scales of cognitive COIs. I seek to answer this question through two studies. The first splits subjects into three groups and exposes each group to a different map extent; they then draw on the map where they think their COI is located. I find that the size of the COI that they draw depends greatly on map extent. The second study exposes subjects to two different map extents, but all of them receive the same two; they then rank places on the map according to how confident they are that they are in their COI. I likewise find that the size of the COI that they define by their rankings depends on the map extent. These findings indicate that the map induces people to externalize their COI at different scales, confirming that multiple scales of cognitive COIs exist and officials must be aware of that fact when they are redistricting at different levels of government.

When deciding where to draw the boundaries for electoral districts, officials often strive to ensure that communities of interest are not split up but kept together within a single district. What exactly constitutes a community of interest is somewhat vague, with legal and academic sources describing either a thematic region with shared demographic and land use traits or a cognitive region that is meaningful to people and commonly agreed upon. This research seeks to identify communities of interest at the sub-city level in both the thematic sense—by clustering Census tracts and land parcels according to classes of important variables—and the cognitive sense—by surveying residents about the location and extent of their community and finding areas of highest agreement. Then the degree to which the two senses of communities overlap is assessed; the more overlap, the more evidence there is that the two definitions correspond closely. Finally, the amount of overlap between the different communities and existing electoral districts is determined, to see which of the two types receives more attention from boundary drawers. The study finds that the two types of communities of interest correspond relatively well, and that the thematic type corresponds with the electoral districts better than the cognitive type.