Community Environs (COMe)

The geographic area units used to conduct to the SAMoSA study are called community environs (COMe). This map shows the boundaries of each COMe in Halifax Regional Municipality.

Community environs (COMe) are a set of custom geographic areas created by Natalie Saint-Jacques (Cancer Care Nova Scotia) and Mikiko Terashima, funded by Cancer Care Nova Scotia. COMe consist of 301 areas representing the ‘communities’ that make up the Province of Nova Scotia. Each area mimics what is generally perceived as communities, which are larger than neighbourhoods but still show common identities and social ties across residents.

COMe boundaries were determined using Census Dissemination Areas (DAs) as building blocks, which will make the linkage with common census data possible. Since DA boundaries do not necessarily align with commonly understood neighbourhoods or communities, some of the DAs were divided to form different COMe units. When census data is used to analyse COMe level characteristics, values for these divided DAs are calculated using counts of residential building points as population weights.