Third places in rural America: Prevalence and disparities in use and meaningful use

Abstract

Third places – the physical places where people meet, gather, and interact outside of home and work – have been linked to civic life and community well-being as well as individual-level benefits across dimensions of health, well-being, and social mobility. However, much of the research on third places in the U.S. focuses on urban areas, severely limiting the generalizability to rural contexts. Moreover, we have little understanding of how third places are used or if there are disparities in meaningful use of third places in rural areas. Therefore, in this paper, we use a nationally representative sample of 1135 rural working-age adults in the U.S. collected in 2022 to descriptively measure use and meaningful use of third places, and use logistic regression models to determine if use and meaningful use varies across socio-demographic characteristics of rural working-age adults. We draw on previous research to propose a definition of meaningful use as spending more than 30 min talking with other people in a third place. In addition, we categorize third places into free versus commercial third places. The results show that the most common third places that are meaningfully used for meeting, gathering, and interacting among rural working-age adults are religious organizations, dine-in restaurants, and parks/lakes. We also find that among working-age adults in rural America, use and meaningful use of third places is negatively associated with socioeconomic status and also varies by age, race and ethnicity, and political ideology. These findings provide the first nationally representative baseline measurement of third place utilization in rural America and provide an initial look at groups that may face barriers and facilitators to use and meaningful use of third places – an important resource for promoting civic life, well-being, and health.