How Do You Calculate, Interpret, And Understand The Location Quotient?
The location quotient is most frequently used in locational analysis, economic geography, and population geography, but it has much wider applicability. The location quotient (LQ) is an index for comparing an area’s share of a particular activity with the area’s share of some basic or aggregate phenomenon. An example would be to look at a census tract’s share of a particular ethnic group population in comparison with a metropolitan area’s share of that group. It is useful for calculating and mapping relative distributions. This article will describe how to calculate a location quotient, and interpret and understand what it means. Open your area and regional data in the spreadsheet or database software program (such as Excel). There should basically be three columns of data to start out with: one column for the name of the particular case, and then two remaining columns of numerical data for each case: one variable for the base phenomenon (total population in our example) and one variab
