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Rural, Urban Communities Agree on More Issues Than Expected [1]
['Liz Carey', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2023-12-05
Despite being portrayed as having vastly different ideologies, people in rural communities have a lot of opinions in common with their urban counterparts, a new study from the American Communities Project has found.
The survey questioned more than 5,000 people across 15 different community types to show a more complex picture of how rural and urban residents view issues.
The three-year project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, used Ipsos to conduct opinion surveys with Americans both on the phone and in online surveys.
What was interesting, researcher Dante Chinni said in an interview with the Daily Yonder, is how much rural residents’ opinions were similar to those of urban residents.
“When we see things where they agree, we’re…interested,” Chinni said. “It was kind of interesting, not only the differences between local and national, but how uniform they were.”
The study found that residents in rural communities felt that the biggest issue in their lives locally was inflation. A poll conducted earlier this fall by the Center for Rural Strategies (which publishes the Daily Yonder) also identified inflation and the cost of living as the biggest concern among both rural and urban residents.
When it came to the biggest issue facing the country, inflation was also the top of the list as well. Similarly, in urban areas, residents said inflation was the biggest issue locally and nationally. Only in communities in the African American South, a rural subcommunity within ACP’s 15 community categories, did anything else come close to inflation as an issue. For residents in those communities, guns and crime nearly tied with inflation as a top local and national issue.
Similarly, nearly 90% of residents in rural categories said they thought their life was on the right track when asked, and about the same percentage felt the country as a whole was on the wrong track. Urban residents agreed with both of those statements in about the same percentages.
Across the board, residents in both rural and urban areas agreed with the statement “Americans have a lot more in common with each other than is generally believed.” While the percentages ranged from 60% to 81%, on average across the different community types 69.6% agreed.
“I think people really want this to be true,” Chinni said. “They want there to be more in common whether or not there actually is. There’s some stuff in this survey that does suggest at least that there’s a desire for there to be commonality.”
Similarly, the survey found residents in both rural and urban communities agreed with the statement “Obtaining an abortion should be a decision made by a woman in consultation with her doctor, without government’s involvement,” and disagreed with the statement “The U.S. government should cut social programs in order to lower taxes.”
“What’s interesting is how abortion was widely accepted by at least 50% of the population, across the community types, even in (more rural conservative areas) where you would think that they would be less okay with abortion,” Ari Pinkus, one of the researchers on the project, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
“It could be the way we asked the question because people don’t like to get in the way of a woman and her doctor, but it’s still notable that abortion is a topic of unity in the population.”
Still, contrasts exist. The study found a divide when residents were presented with some value statements. In statements like “The right to own a firearm is central to what it means to be an American,” residents in more rural communities were more likely to agree, whereas those in urban counties were more likely to disagree.
“The gun question is one where people in rural communities are much more likely to see owning a gun as part of what it is to be an American, whereas in urban communities, they see that differently,” Chinni said. “It’s an interesting way of phrasing the question, but… it really does put it in its most elemental context (and illustrate) the differences in these communities.”
Chinni and Pinkus said more research needs to be done to examine the cause of the differences and what can be done to bring the country back together. Identifying where the cultural differences are, how they come about, and what can be done to address them can be the start to bridging that rural/urban gap, they said.
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[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/study-rural-urban-communities-agree-on-more-issues-than-expected-but-differences-remain/2023/12/05/
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