Combating substance abuse with the potential of geographic information system combining multivariate analysis

Abstract

Substance abuse problems have been a growing concern for people from all over the world. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of a combination between a geographic information system and a multivariate analysis in substance abuse research. However, due to the limited studies on a combination of both these methods in the substance abuse field, we review some other studies in various fields indicating the potential of this method in future substance abuse studies. As the expertise of GIS lies in spatial analysis and the multivariate analysis lies in analyzing huge data thus being capable of interpreting the results very well, we hope this method will attract researchers to applying it in their studies and can consequently and indirectly help in combating substance abuse problems.

Keywords: substance abuse; geographic information system; multivariate analysis;  spatial analysis; combat