Rurals

The term rurals is used as an expression of different rural areas as not being defined. Many authors involved in mental health research in rural areas, stress the importance of steering clear of inflexible blanket definitions of rurality (Philo, 2003), and to instead 'select definitions of rurality that are appropriate to the study being conducted' (Cloke, 1977).

References

Philo C., Parr H., and Burns N., (2003) Rural madness: a geographical reading and critique of the rural mental health literature, "Journal of Rural Studies", Volume 19, Issue 3, pp. 259-281. * [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VD9-48CWWMB-2/2/06ab1125f19cbff80630fc0104448c9e)]

Cloke, P., (1977) An index of rurality for England and Wales. "Regional Studies B" 11, pp. 31–46.

Cloke's index of rurality: Devised by P J Cloke in 1977. Cloke’s index categorises all areas of England and Wales into four criteria: extreme rural, intermediate rural, intermediate non-rural and extreme non-rural; as well as urban areas. Cloke used 16 different ways of drawing the conclusions for his model, all of which lead to the measure of an area’s rurality.