THE RELATIONSHIP OF RETAIL-SERVICE PATTERNS TO TRADE-CENTER POPULATION.

The varying complexity of services present in different trade centers in an area has long been observed and has formed the basis for a number of classifications of agricultural trade centers. In this paper, an attempt is made to classify centers according to complexity of types of retail services, by a precise method. It was found that the Guttman scaling technique was useful in ordering the centers according to the cumulative complexity of types of retail services. The service patterns thus arrived at were found to be related to the population changes of the centers, indicating that the classification has meaning in terms of the function of the centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]