Measuring and understanding the differences between urban and rural areas

Abstract

Understanding the factors that make a location more rural or urban is an important task for planners and policymakers. Traditional individual characteristics of rurality sometimes hide the more complex social as well as physical dynamics of a locality. This paper builds on early work which applied factor analysis to construct a single index of rurality. An approach is developed with a combined metric encompassing multiple measures. These are capable individually of defining rurality but together they deliver greater insight on more complex patterns and help to redefine the simple notion of rurality. The paper then utilises a novel graphical method, the constellation graph, providing a diagnostic and visual framework to aid planners when assessing the spatial dimensions of a locality.

Indexing third stream activities in UK universities: exploring the entrepreneurial/enterprising university

“…This section describes results from indexing undertaken on the PCA factor analysis employed on the two forms of the data considered (original and logged). Details on the indexing approach employed are given in Beynon et al (2015). Throughout this exposition results are presented to enable easiest opportunity to compare across original and logged forms of the data.…”

“…Following the index approach in Beynon et al (2015), items (variables) making up a factor are weight-plotted across the domain of a constellation graph. This weighting is the pseudonormalised forms of the item's loadings for a factor.…”

“…For the logged data, with loadings, 0.925, 0.940 and 0.920, which sum to 2.785, hence their normalised values are, 0.332, 0.338 and 0.330. Following the plotting approach described in Beynon et al (2015), with this described weighting process for each university (on each form of data), a constellation coordinate (herein shortened to coordinate) is identified to represent the associated factor in the constellation graph domain. In Figure 1, the eight constellation graphs show the university's considered (labelled with code given in Table A1 in Appendix A) over each factor, University Knowledge Exploitation Activity (UKEA), Staff Spin-out Activity, Non-HEI Owned Spin-out Activity and Graduate Start-up Activity (top to bottom), and whether using original or logged data (left and right).…”

“…The indexing method undertaken follows Beynon et al (2015), who introduced a constellation graph approach to elucidation of an index (urban-rural in their case). They utilised results from the employment of PCA, and were able to also elucidate sub-indexes (from the found factors), weight aggregated to give a final index.…”

Construction and Use of a Simple Index of Urbanisation in the Rural–Urban Interface of Bangalore, India

“…It was later adapted to smaller scales (at the ZIP-code level) in a study directed to health care in rural areas of the US [10]. As reviewed by Beynon et al [11], other authors used larger sets of variables and elaborate procedures of weighting and factor analysis to develop indices that capture multiple dimensions of rurality such as population and housing, migratory, and social dynamics.…”