Q+A and Interview with Matthew Nicholson on Interdisciplinary Health Geography

Matthew Nicholson is an MSc student at McMaster University studying health geography. His thesis investigates post-settlement health inequalities among immigrant sub-populations in Canada. By analyzing the StatsCan Canadian community health survey, he quantifies subjective health measures and investigates how social environments influence health. 

Q: What would you say is the best part of working on this type of project, would you say?

A: I think the best part about working in the field of geography, or in human geography, is the huge diversity of theory and methods that are available to you. There's lots of fields that do similar research: You could be in epidemiology, you could be in biostatistics, you could be in health sciences, and do similar research. In particular, you get the analytics of human geography, which are very diverse and very socially informed. 

Q: What in particular interests you about your research?

A: I think that it's primarily exploratory: I'm doing explanatory modeling, not predictive modeling. I'm looking to explain some relationship between these things: 

Is there a post-settlement health decline among recent immigrants? What is that mediated by? What social characteristics, what sociodemographic variables, are involved? 

Is it spatially dependent? 

Are there different areas that are worse or better for that? 

So: I think that those are important questions and I'm hoping that the answers would be informative. Because, ultimately my goal is that the questions that I ask will bring to light these health inequalities, which are quite persistent… And targetable, localized, and with interventions that can be proposed. 

Q: How is the health sciences going to change in the next 20 years?

A: That's a great question: It's hard to answer. I think that more allied health practitioners are doing research, which I think is really good. 

There’s lots of nurses who do research, and lots of social workers who do research. I think more of that will be good, because it gives a fuller picture of what's happening… Since different people ask different questions. 

As far as methods… We're definitely seeing more qualitative research in health research, which I think is important. My research is quantitative, so what I'm doing is I'm looking at the numerical representation of health in data. It's hard to generalize from that. But talking to people about their health can really help to get at this phenomenon of health. They're both important… So I think that more qualitative data is really a good thing. 

Q: What advice would you give to undergraduate students hoping to enter the field? 

A: One piece of advice for them? I would say read about topics in the field. I think that that was the most helpful thing for me. Some people have done an undergraduate degree in geography, and then it maybe is a bit more of a smooth transition. But I think that the best thing you can do is talk to people who are geographers and read geography journals: Immerse yourself into that, it will start to make sense.