Where is rural? An analysis of the agreement between quantitative measures of rurality

Abstract

Government agencies and researchers often rely on quantitative measures to map where rural places are and who belongs to rural communities. To better understand the consistency, or lack thereof, across different quantitative rural measures, we compare four common measures applied at the county level for the contiguous United States. Our purpose was to (1) quantify and map the degree of rural agreement among these selected rural measures and (2) describe key characteristics of counties classified as rural through urban. We found that different measures yielded little agreement on rural places with consensus of only 114 of 3108 counties. County variables contributing to good separability in rural to urban classifications included remoteness, population density, percent of the population aged 65 and over, employment in the agricultural sector, and both developed and grassland landcover. Closer examination of the underlying characteristics of the 114 consensus rural counties provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of popular rural measures and the variables they use. If these counties are not representative of how researchers conceptualize “rural” across US regions, it is motivation for working toward new and/or spatially adaptive rural measures that better represent the communities that policy and research intends to help.