East Coast Ballroom
Issues with Current Urban-Rural Classification Measures and Some Alternatives (307795)
*Jason Brinkley, Abt AssociatesJustin Stein, Abt Associates
Suja Thomas, Abt Associates
Keywords: Rural Health; Disparities; Urban;
One of the biggest issues plaguing consistent analysis of U.S. geographic disparities is the variety of measures that classify regions as "urban" or "rural". While the geographic unit itself does present some challenges (e.g. states versus counties versus zip codes versus census tracts) much of the variation comes in the many different ways regions are classified. Some metrics are designed to separate urban versus non-urban and tend to classify smaller suburban areas as more associated with urban locales. In contrast other measures tend to divide regions more as rural (i.e. remote) and non- rural. Both mechanisms struggle to deal with the regions that fall somewhere in between. We highlight the current popular methods of classifying urban versus rural, discuss how they disagree on associations with popular health indicators. We propose some alternatives that attempt to incorporate other features such as amenity density, health care access, broadband internet availability, and others.