Christallers theory states that larger settlements have a great sphere of influence

Geog Course Work

Stage 1: Planning

My Hypothesis was that the greater the population within the town boundary the greater number and variety of services. I wanted to prove that if there is a wide variety of services the sphere of influence will be greater and people would travel further to avail of these services. The sphere of influence is the area served by a particular settlement.

In order to prove my hypothesis I will have to go out to my chosen settlements and record a list of all the services offered. I will also have to design a questionnaire in which I can establish how far people are travelling to avail of the services offered by my chosen settlements.

The settlements I am going to investigate include: Enniskillen, Lisnaskea, Brookeborough, Maguiresbridge, Newtownbutler, Fivemiletown, Clones, Smithborough and finally Monaghan. Enniskillen and Monaghan have the largest population of the lot so therefore the should both offer a wider range of services and offer a better selection of H.O.G. I include maps of my route and town maps of Monaghan and Enniskillen, see appendix fig 1. In order to carry out my work and to prove my point I am going to need to design a quick and easy way of recording the number of services offered by a settlement, record the number of services and I will also need to design a questionnaire which will be able to give me an average of the distance people have travelled to avail of the services offered by the settlement and what service they have come to avail off. The work will involve myself and the whole class being split into groups and travelling to the settlements we are investigating and record the variety and number of services offered, we will also have to try and get some of the public to complete a number of surveys in order to establish our approx distance in which the sphere of influence affect the area.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Before I carry out my field work I will need to design a quick and easy way of recording the number or certain services within the town boundary. As a class wee have talked this over and we have compiled a list of all the possible services a town can provide and we have put them into a table in which a tally of the services can be recorded, see appendix fig 2 in which I include a copy of the finished table. I will also along with the class have to design a questionnaire in which I will try to get all the data I need to establish if my hypothesis is true. Questions such an “How far have you travelled” “What service have you came to avail of” “Do you come her often”. We will design this survey in the form of a tick survey. We will have grouped together some of the possible answers and therefore leaving it very accurate yet quick for the person carrying out the survey. We as a class will also need to be split up into groups so we can get all the chosen settlements covered within the day, and we can then collate our results together as a class when we get back to school.

Once we have all collected our results we will have to collate them together. We will have to get a list of all the services recorded in a settlement from each group and collate them together to get the total number of services offered by a settlement. This will have to be repeated for each of our chosen settlements. Once we have done that we will have to try and collate all the questionnaires for each settlement together so that we can try and establish an average for each question for each of the chosen settlements.

Once we have collated all the results together we should be able to establish if our hypothesis is true. In order to this we will have to count all the services offered by the settlements. Then we will have to get an average from the surveys for the settlement in which we can establish how far the average person has travelled to avail of the services offered by the settlement. Once we have done this for each of our chosen settlements we should be able to see how many services are offered by the settlement and how far the average person has travelled to avail of the services, thus hopefully either proving that our hypothesis was true, or false. We will also include graphs to illustrate our results and make them easier to understand.