Economic Research Service
Nat’l Academy of Sciences
Workshop on
Rationalizing
Rural Area Classifications
David L. Brown
Cornell University
RSS 2015
Madison Wisconsin
What is the NAS?
What is a NAS Workshop?
• The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, nonprofit organization of
the country’s leading researchers.
• The NAS advises the nation on science, engineering and medicine
• The NAS includes the National Research Council
• Social Sciences are located within the NRC’s Division of Social Sciences and Education
• This Division is further broken down into committees; in this case the Committee on National
Statistics
• The NAS conducts workshops at the request of government agencies,
universities, scientific organizations, foundations, etc.
• This workshop was requested, and sponsored by, the USDA-Economic Research
Service
• NAS studies make recommendations; NAS Workshops Do Not
What ERS Hoped to Learn
• ERS asked that the workshop respond to five (5) questions
1. Should ERS abandon the concept of nonmetro adjacency (to metro) and move
toward distinguishing distance from urban centers?
2. Would a new rural-urban county classification based on urban area size AND
distance to larger cities be useful?
3. Various technical considerations
• How many categories can a coding system contain w/o becoming too complex?
• What thresholds and breakpoints are useful?
• Should classification schemes for counties, tracts, zip codes be conceptionally consistent?
4. Should the urbanized area play a central role in a revised rural/urban classification
scheme (rather than MSA)?
• Especially with respect to delineating labor market areas
5. How to balance the needs of different user communities?
• Social science research
• Policy and program analysis
• Program managers in and outside of USDA
• Targeting and program eligibility
The Workshop Process
[Items in red still to be accomplished]
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NAS appointed the Steering Committee and the Committee Chair
• Based on ERS’ recommendation
• All serve for gratis
The Steering Committee met multiple times to develop the program and identify the speakers
and participants
• 5 paper preparers received an honorarium; otherwise participants were reimbursed for travel, but receive no
pay
• This is a basic aspect of the NAS culture
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The NAS invited the participants and commissioned relevant analyses and literature reviews
The NAS held a 1.5 day workshop in Washington DC
• at NAS headquarters
The NAS delivered speaker slides and commissioned papers to ERS
The NAS delivered workshop transcript to ERS
The NAS will provide a pre-publication workshop summary, and a composed workshop
summary
CNSTAT staff will conduct a briefing for ERS
The Steering Committee and the Sponsor
• Steering Committee
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David Brown (Cornell) chair
James Fitzsimmons (US Census Bureau)
Stephan Goetz (Penn State)
Mark Partridge (Ohio State)
David Plane (Univ. of Arizona)
Brigitte Waldorf (Purdue)
• Sponsor (ERS Staff)
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Mary Bohman, Administrator
Marcia Weinberg, Director, Resources and Rural Economics Division
Robert Gibbs, Associate Director
David McGranahan, Chief, Rural Economy Branch
John Cromartie, Population Geographer
Timothy Parker, Sociologist
Workshop Speakers/Participants
Sociologists and Demographers
• Sociologists (RSS members in red)
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Greg Hooks (McMaster)
Leif Jensen (Penn State)
Ken Johnson (New Hampshire)
Dan Lichter (Cornell)
Linda Lobao (Ohio State)
Richelle Winkler (Michigan Tech)
John Logan (Brown)
Mark Shucksmith (Newcastle, UK)
• Demographers
• Jeffrey Hardcastle (Nevada State
Demograher)
Geographers and Economists
• Geographers
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Keith Halfacre (Swansea, UK)
Michael Ratcliffe (US Census)
Michael Woods (Aberystwyth, UK)
Mark Perry (US Census)
• Economists/Policy Analysts
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Mary Bohman (USDA-ERS)
Yicheol Han (Penn State)
Tom Johnson (Missouri)
Ayoung Kim (Purdue)
Sarah Low (USDA-ERS)
Alan Murray (Drexel)
Douglas O’Brien (White House)
Rose Olfert (Purdue)
Carlianne Patrick (Georgia State)
Paolo Veneri (OECD, Paris)
Bruce Weber (Oregon State)
The 1.5 day Program
• Thursday, April 16
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Session # 1: Welcome
Session # 2: Historical Development of Current Rural Area Classification Systems
Session # 3: How Rural Area Classification is Done Elsewhere in the US and Internationally
Session # 4: The Big Picture: Changes in Society and Economy That Have Contributed to the Need
for Reconsidering Rural Classification Systems
• Session # 5: Different Ways to Conceptualize Rural Areas in Metropolitan Society
• Session # 6: How the Current Rural Area Classification Systems Are Used in Research and in
Program Design and Administration
• Friday, April 17
• Session # 7: Changes in Social Science Data and Methods, and Their Impact on Rural
Classification
• Session # 8: Evaluating the Reliability of Rural Area Classifications
• Session # 9: Alternate Futures for Rural Area Classification
• Adjourn
Some Observations (My own, not official workshop)
• In the US, a high percentage, although not all, of the research and analysis in this area is
conducted at Land Grant Universities and in government agencies
• By and large, the workshop participants believed that the ERS classification systems are
conceptually and operationally valid, albeit needing periodic updating
• New data and statistical techniques present the opportunity to focus more analysis below the
county level
• New and revised classification systems should be kept as simple as possible
• There is clear evidence that ERS’ rural/urban coding schemes are used by numerous agencies to
identify areas of need, to determine program eligibility, and to target government programs
• The research discussed at the workshop failed to give a high priority to issues of poverty,
inequality, race and ethnicity, etc.
• This neglects the reality of contemporary rural America, and its future
• Rural area classification and analysis is better thought out in regional science, geography,
and economics than in American sociology
• Conventional geographic units are reasonable proxies for local economy, but not for community
• In regional science, etc. the focus is often on inter-area variability in geographic performance
• Hence, a uni-level analysis that does not beg the question of micro-macro transition
• In sociology and human geography much of the interest is multi-level where spatial units are
contexts that hypothetically affect household of individual behavior and life chances
• Weakly theorized and poorly measured contexts (for ex: counties) introduce error in multi-level analysis
• What is the scale at which context matters in rural? Does this differ from Urban (neighborhoods)
Riffing of Eddy Berry’s Thought Provoking RSS Presidential
Address: 2 Complimentary Perspectives to Rural Definition
• International Handbook of Rural Studies (Shucksmith & Brown 2016f)
• Structural/Demographic (Many of us in this room)
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Population Size, density
Access: Time/distance
Economic functions (occasionally)
“ Mobilities”: blurring of rural/urban boundaries
• Social construction [rural as a social representation: a social imaginary] (Halfacre)
• cultural turn in rural studies--what rurality means, and to whom
• rural cannot be understood as a specific type of space, but had to be seen instead in terms of social representation
• What people think of rural: signs, symbols, images
• Rematerializing the rural (Cloke, Murdock, Halfacre)
• “relational’ approach to rural studies
• Rural as practised, represented and material
• Rural as a site of social struggle among groups with contesting symbolic representations and material interests
• meanings and symbols may be manipulated and contested
• These approaches are complimentary
• The social constructivist approach may not contribute to establishing statistical boundaries, but it provides
insights into the social relationships that produce and reproduce rural society and rural social change
Final Thoughts
• Having reliable methods for delineating rural and
urban areas is very important for scholarly research,
and policy design/administration
• I really enjoyed and benefitted from chairing this
workshop.
• I was proud that the sociological perspective was so ably
presented by RSS members
• I want to thank ERS, and especially John Cromatrie
and David McGranahan for this opportunity.