Developing an empirical socioeconomic typology of counties in five western states

Interpreting What is Rural and Urban for Western U.S. Counties

“…We recognize legitimate concerns about the validity and value of using a continuum, questions about the notion that urban is the opposite of rural, the implied continuity between rural and urban, and the failure to identify causal mechanisms to distinguish between types of rural areas (Pahl 1966;Newby 1986;Hoggart 1990). It is clear, however, that much of the public, as well as many academics studying the western U.S., continue to identify particular places as either rural or urban, or as some variant in between, based on their own interpretations (e.g., Spilton et al 1981;ERS 1989;Butler 1990;Harris et al 1993). Throughout most of the 20th century, the notion that rural and urban are dichotomous descriptors of place has remained popular (Bryan 1986).…”

“…Our goal is to explore how conventional quantitative indicators of urbanness and rurality can be used to interpret the unevenness of counties across the western United States. Cluster analysis has been used in a wide variety of applications, including other research involving county classifications and perceptual analyses (Miller 1976;Spilton et al 1981;Harris et al 1993;Dagel 1997). In this analysis, we use the same six census measures as in the regression analysis.…”

“…3 Cloke and Thrift (1994) suggest that these phases are progressively ordered, although not in a strictly linear fashion because earlier phases continue to have some currency. 4 Other examples of quantitative models include Spilton et al (1981), who use 131 variables to come up with eight socioeconomic factors and 24 county clusters in their analysis of counties in five western U.S. states, and Harris et al (1993) who use various census variables to identify clusters of rural counties within Nevada. 5 These five attributes came from frequent responses to the open-ended survey question.…”