Note: Updates to this data product are discontinued. Dozens of definitions are currently used by Federal and State agencies, researchers, and policymakers. The ERS Rural Definitions data product allows users to make comparisons among nine representative rural definitions.

Methods of designating the urban periphery range from the use of municipal boundaries to definitions based on counties. Definitions based on municipal boundaries may classify as rural much of what would typically be considered suburban. Definitions that delineate the urban periphery based on counties may include extensive segments of a county that many would consider rural.

We have selected a representative set of nine alternative rural definitions and compare social and economic indicators from the 2000 decennial census across the nine definitions. We chose socioeconomic indicators (population, education, poverty, etc.) that are commonly used to highlight differences between urban and rural areas.This record was taken from the USDA Enterprise Data Inventory that feeds into the https://data.gov catalog. Data for this record includes the following resources: Webpage with links to Excel files State-Level Maps For complete information, please visit https://data.gov.

The sample was drawn by means of the central population register (CPR) of Statistics Sweden. CPR contains basic demographic and social data on every individual born on the 15th of any month, any year, and irrespective of place of birth or place of residence. Thus CPR forms, in effect, a 3.3 probability sample of the entire Swedish population. From CPR were drawn all men born in any of the years 1899, 1902, 1905, and so on, down to and including 1923. Thus there are nine birth cohorts, spaced with three-year intervals. Information about occupation in the present (son's) generation was taken from CPR. The method for gathering information on occupation in the previous (father's) generation was a different one. In CPR parish of birth (if in Sweden) and date of birth is always stated. Consequently every person can be located in the copies of the parish birth registers filed in Stockholm, and in these registers the father's occupation is stated (if the father is known). Other data collected from the CPR: place of birth and current place of residence, marital status, age of the parents, and information on income based on the tax assessments.

aThe means and population proportions in this column are weighted values, averaged across the 25 imputed data-sets (total n = 942).bAs these variables were continuous rather than categorical, results are presented as means and beta coefficients in standard deviation units, rather than as proportions and odds ratios.