Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) Development Project: Demographic Description and Frontier Enhancement

Funder:	Office of Rural Health Policy (ORHP)
Research center:	WWAMI Rural Health Research Center Phone: 206.685.0402
Lead researcher:	L. Gary Hart, PhD , 520.626.6258, garyhart@email.arizona.edu
Project completed:	January 2005
Topics:	Defining rural Frontier health

There is considerable current debate and political lobbying about how to define frontier areas. Rural-Urban Commuting Areas (RUCAs) are a new census tract-based classification scheme that utilizes the standard Bureau of Census Urbanized Area (UA) and Urban Place (UP) defini-tions in combination with commuting information to characterize all the nation's census tracts regarding their rural and urban status and relationships. The codes are based on whether a Census tract is located in a UA or UP and on the destination of its largest and second largest commuting flows. The methods used to accomplish the demographic description of the RUCA codes involved standard cross-tabulation analysis of the code areas nationally, regionally, and by state.

This project augments the initial RUCA work by:

• Producing and describing the base 1998 demography of the RUCA code areas.
• Creating quality state maps of the RUCA codes.
• Making this information and the codes easily available on the Web at http://depts.washington.edu/uwruca/index.html.

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