Attractiveness of Different Districts in Helsinki: Segregation in Terms of Poor Financial and Educational Status of the Residents

Abstract

The aim of this research is to study attractiveness of different districts in Helsinki. The research tries to find out if there are differences, and on the other hand, similarities between different districts in Helsinki if the financial and educational status of the residents are compared. The main research question is; are there some districts in Helsinki that have a risk to segregate in terms of poor financial and educational status of the residents? Previous researches related to this topic were mainly related to either educational segregation or economic segregation but there is a lack of researches which concentrate on the both aspects at the same time, and take also bad credit history into consideration. This study is based on three different open data sets, two datasets from Paavo and one from Suomen Asiakastieto. In order to find out if there is segregation based on the average income, education level and bad credit history we use clustering analysis and especially dendrograms to analyze the data. In this study dendrograms are used for hierarchical cluster analysis. All of the dendrograms are created in IBM SPSS Statistics 22 -program. The results derived from two dendrograms and a proximity matrix created indicate that in general all of the areas in Helsinki are quite similar with each other. However, the dissimilarity between the extremities is eminent.