Spatial Determinants of Health Lab
Advancing spatial and social theory to understand and address health inequities in Canada.
Health is not distributed randomly. It is shaped by where people live, work, and age — and by the social and structural forces that make some places healthier than others. The Spatial Determinants of Health Lab at Carleton University studies these relationships through the lens of health geography, using spatial theory and quantitative methods to understand how place, inequality, and health intersect across Canada.
Our current research spans four interconnected themes: health service access and antifragility in rural communities; geography and mental health; environmental exposures and neurodevelopmental disorders; and multiple-cause-related mortality by income and geography. Our research across these themes is connected via a focus on quantitative methods and the development of novel measurement approaches, analytic tools, and new data sources. Across these projects, our team works with complex Statistics Canada microdata in the Carleton Research Data Centre, develops interactive geospatial visualizations, and promotes open science through open-access datasets and code libraries.
Research Themes
- Rural health and service accessibility: examining geographic barriers to health and social services across Canada, with particular attention to communities defined by remoteness and social marginalization.
- Geography and mental health: understanding spatial and social inequalities in mental health outcomes, focussing on the use of geographic methods in mental health research.
- Environmental exposures and neurodevelopment: investigating the spatial dimensions of environmental risk factors and their associations with developmental disorders.
- Cause-related and multiple-cause mortality: analyzing income-based gradients in mortality across Canada using linked administrative and vital statistics data.
Open Data and the Rural Data Portal
Alongside our peer-reviewed research, the lab develops and maintains open data resources for researchers, public health professionals, and community partners. Our Rural Data Portal supports an ongoing research program on rural health and the social determinants of health in Canada, built around the Canadian Accessibility and Remoteness Index (CARI+)— a population-weighted measure of travel time and distance from every dissemination area in Canada to essential services including emergency departments, schools, and birth services.
The portal provides four modes of access: plain-language research summaries, an interactive data explorer, spatial mapping tools, and versioned dataset downloads archived on Borealis with DOIs, licences, and R code. All releases are paired with plain-language summaries to ensure the work reaches beyond the academic literature.
| Explore the data at: https://rural-data.com.
Forthcoming Handbook: Geographic Methods for Mental Health Research
The lab is leading a major new scholarly resource in health geography. The Handbook of Geography in Mental Health Research, co-edited by Tomoko McGaughey and Paul Peters, is forthcoming from De Gruyter Press in 2027. The handbook addresses a recognized gap in the field: despite rapid growth in spatial epidemiology and health geography, geographic methods have been under-utilized in mental health research. Structured across six sections — from historical foundations and individual-level spatial analysis to environmental determinants, service geography, and data ethics — it is designed to serve as both a scholarly reference and a practical methods resource for researchers working at the intersection of geography and mental health.
From Research to Practice
Our lab works with community and health system partners to translate spatial research into tools that support decision-making. This includes geospatial analytics partnerships with Ontario Health Teams and presentations to public health audiences on place-based approaches to understanding health-seeking behaviour. We are committed to producing work that is legible beyond the academy — to policymakers, planners, and communities — without sacrificing theoretical or methodological rigour.
Training the Next Generation
The lab is home to a diverse community of scholars at every stage of their academic journey — from undergraduate interns and honours thesis students to Master’s and PhD researchers in Health Sciences and related programs. We are committed to training the next generation of scholars, with a particular emphasis on quantitative literacy, spatial reasoning, and engaged scholarship. We also collaborate with affiliated faculty across Carleton’s departments and faculties, particularly with Geography and Environmental Studies.
Research Updates
Protocol: Neurodevelopmental Disorder Symptoms In Children And Adolescents Exposed To Ambient Air Pollution: A Scoping Review Protocol
This scoping review will examine epidemiologic studies assessing associations between ambient air pollution exposure and neurodevelopmental disorder symptoms for three childhood neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, ASD, …
StoryMap: Access to Obstetrical Care Across Canada
What do we know? Rural obstetrical care in Canada has limited local access, meaning many women must travel, sometimes over two hours, to give birth. …
Protocol: Health-Related Determinants Of Internal Migration Among Older Adults In Canada
This project aims to map existing research on the internal migration, spatial mobility or residential relocation of older adults in Canada. It focuses especially on …
Preprint: Population-based characterisation of child and adolescent oral microbiomes
Robyn Wright, Vanessa DeClercq, Christie Burton, Nicole Roslin, Alex Chan, Paul Arnold, Paul Peters, Russell Schachar, Jennifer Crosbie, Morgan Langille Abstract The factors influencing the …
PhD Success: Sarah Jones
Evaluating the impacts of the Tłı̨chǫ Highway on food security and other determinants of health in Whatì, NWT. Sarah Jones, PhD Abstract Many Indigenous populations …
New Article: Creating an Inclusive Definition for High Users of Inpatient Hospital Systems That Considers Different Levels of Rurality
Tomoko McGaughey, George Kephart, Utkarsh J. Dang, and Paul A. Peters Abstract Multiple definitions have been used to identify individuals who are high system users …