Rural Health Lifestyles: The role of demographic change and migration shifts on rural women's health

Project Summary This project aims to use multiple secondary demographic and health data sets to identify the demographic and behavioral pathways responsible for increasing rural mortality disadvantages for women. The goal is to first determine how rural women’s mortality varies across county-level demographic factors and how it has changed over time in the context of shifting demographic patterns that have brought new residents into rural regions due to jobs, retirement, or Covid-19 migration. It also aims to understand how rural women’s health lifestyles or combinations of health behaviors have shifted over time in response to new residents and the relative consequences of these behaviors on health and mortality. By Identifying how these different compositional and contextual county-level factors have changed over time across various degrees of rurality, ranging from the least to most rural counties, we will ultimately identify the risk factors and potential intervention points to increase the healthy lifespan for rural women.