Rural Notes
Rural Notes is my working-notes outlet for an ongoing research program on rural measurement and rural-related attitudes and policy in the United States. My work here is really research-in-progress: descriptive analyses, methodological essays, and short reviews of other people’s work. My aim is to develop, in public and at a sustainable pace, the measurement infrastructure and substantive findings that will eventually become a fielded survey and a set of peer-reviewed papers.
My organizing premise is that a finding about “rural America” is only as good as the rurality measure that produced it. Most published work picks one operationalization (e.g., geographic, self-identified, density-based, cultural) without justifying the choice. That choice often drives the result. My posts here treat the measurement question as substantive, not methodological housekeeping, and I hope to apply that lens across a variety of domains.
A note on what these posts are not. They are not press releases for finished work, and they are not opinion pieces. They are my own research notes. I plan for any post involving data to come with reproducible code and a PDF should anyone need it.
What to expect
Right now I plan to do four things on a roughly monthly cadence:
- Measurement essays that argue for or against a particular way of operationalizing “rural,” typically without new data.
- Re-analyses of public data (e.g., Pew ATP, ANES, CES, GSS) applying multiple rurality measures side-by-side to the same substantive question.
- Reviews of other people’s work, with attention to what was measured well and what the next round of rural research needs to address.
- Open puzzles: short pieces that name an unanswered question and propose what an ideal survey would have to measure to answer it.
