Is there a better way to do this? Is there a way to do this more generally across the country?

Questions & Help
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1

Hello! I am interested to look at the impact of COVID on home delivery services for retails. For a particular city, I would like to look at dwell time of visitors at locations which are housing complexes/apartments away from retail stores. My approach at present is to look at the patterns data for a self-identified region of interest in the city. Is there a better way to do this? Is there a way to do this more generally across the country?

2

Hey Partha – In our Shop, you can put the Location filter as the USA and get the patterns for all cities/regions/postal_codes rather than go city by city.

3

One thing to note, and not sure if this affects your study, is that the core places file provides baseline information for every record in the SafeGraph product suite. The current scope of a place is defined as any location humans can visit with the exception of single family homes, multi-family homes, and apartments.

4

@Saumil_Shah_SafeGraph Thanks for pointing it out Saumil! It actually does affect the study. Do you have any proxy for such apartment/home visits that can be used instead? For example, would there be data on visits and dwell times at Amazon lockers located in apartments?

5

@Ryan_Kruse_MN_State would you happen to know of any work arounds?

6

Hi @Partha_Mishra_Kellogg_School_of_Management, this may be tricky to accomplish for reasons Saumil mentioned.

SafeGraph also has a Neighborhood Patterns dataset, which has visit data at the neighborhood (census block group) level instead of the POI level. I’m not sure if it will be helpful, but maybe a take a look at the docs I linked to, just in case!

There was a paper that used SafeGraph data to analyze the impact of the pandemic on in-person dining vs delivery options for both franchises and independent restaurants. Again, I’m not sure if it will be helpful, but it may be worth taking a look to see how they approached it.

Otherwise I don’t have any ideas for accomplishing this. Please let us know if you have any other ideas, questions, or thoughts on how it could be done. Unfortunately, the problem may need to be restructured to be answerable :thinking_face: