Rural Living Research Articles

Accessibility and Optimization of Rural Healthcare Facilities From the Perspective of the Rural Living Circle

Accessibility and Optimization of Rural Healthcare Facilities From the Perspective of the Rural Living Circle

‘We kept having this internal conflict around the language of handout and hand-up’: independent living philosophy and rural disability services during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract In the United States, Centers for Independent Living (CILs) staff were at the frontlines of responding to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural people with disabilities. Growing out of the Independent Living (IL) Movement , CILs emphasize independence, autonomy, choice, and control for disabled people and do not typically have financial or other resources to give away. To better understand the experiences of CIL staff in using the CARES Act monies and serving rural people with disabilities, researchers at the Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities in collaboration with the Association for Programs in Rural Independent Living (APRIL) used thematic coding to analyze the transcripts of eight national online peer support meetings that were facilitated by APRIL. We found CIL staff described distributing financial assistance to cover essential household needs such as rent, utilities, internet access, and various items. In turn, they also shared that they grappled with conflicts created by the influx of CARES Act funding, which put CIL staff in the position of providing what some described as ‘handouts’ rather than CILs’ usual work of providing consumers with a ‘hand-up’ through training and other non-financial supports. This project highlights a unique challenge CIL staff faced as they attempted to stay true to IL philosophy while concurrently meeting the needs of rural people with disabilities in crisis during the pandemic.

HPR71 Successfully Remaining in Community for Home Health Care Patients With Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia: The Role of Living Arrangements and Rural Living

HPR71 Successfully Remaining in Community for Home Health Care Patients With Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia: The Role of Living Arrangements and Rural Living

Defining Wellness-Focused Design for Rural Tourism: Study Case of Penanggungan Village

Rural tourism has great potential in enhancing the local welfare in Indonesia regions. It offers natural environment and authentic experience for tourists in improving health and wellbeing. Architectural design can play an important role to promote wellness in rural tourism as a branding strategy. Healthy design guidelines are required to enhance healthy benefits of rural living without neglecting the local culture and identity. Thus, wellness-focused design of tourism village should consider contextual aspects aligned with vernacular design principles. This study investigates how rural tourism can promote wellness through architectural design ideation considering vernacular principles. It aims to formulate wellness-focused design concept of tourism village based on a case study of Penanggungan village, Mojokerto, Indonesia. Literature study was carried out to conceptualize the basic design concepts of healthy rural tourism. Field observations and interviews were also conducted to contextualize the findings from literature study. This study produces design principles for developing healthy tourism village: (1) Healthy Product as a core of agrotourism, (2) Healthy Environment signifying attachment on nature, (3) Healthy Lifestyle reflecting the enjoyment of simple rural life, and (4) Healthy image as an icon representing healthy rural life. The implementation of these design principles is also discussed.

Rural Living and Social Determinates of Health

Rural Living and Social Determinates of Health

Rural Living in the Post-Urbanization Era and the Concept of “Mobile Regions”

Rural Living in the Post-Urbanization Era and the Concept of “Mobile Regions”

The impact of rural living environment improvement programs on the subjective well-being of rural residents in China

Increasing people’s subjective well-being (SWB) remains a critical challenge for all countries. However, few studies have been dedicated to examining the influence of environmental governance programs on SWB, especially in developing and non-democratic societies. This paper aims to fill this void by taking the Rural Living Environment Improvement (RLEI) program in China—the largest rural living environment governance program in history, as an example to understand the role of environmental governance programs in SWB in the world’s biggest developing and non-democratic country. Based on 3747 individual samples from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey database, we found that RLEI can significantly improve rural residents’ SWB. This effect remains significant after using the propensity score matching method and the instrumental variable approach to address potential selection bias and endogenous problems. The indirect analysis shows that RLEI can increase rural residents’ SWB mainly through improving their income, consumption expenditure, and health. Compared with rural sewage and livestock manure RLEI programs, rural waste RLEI program has a greater enhanced impact on rural residents’ SWB. The monetary value of RLEI based on the life satisfaction approach shows that the resulting improvement in rural residents’ SWB created by RLEI is almost equivalent to the effect of household income. While the monetary value of rural sewage, livestock manure, and rural waste RLEI program is equivalent to 1.2, 3.67, and 1.1 times the effect of household income. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that RLEI has a greater positive impact on SWB for junior and old-aged, low-educated, Midwestern and Northeastern, and working rural residents.

Developing a Holistic Approach for Constructing Rural Living Circles in the Loess Plateau—Taking Yongning Village as an Example

Insufficient public service facilities in rural areas, which leads to failures in meeting the needs of villagers, has become a significant barrier to the high-quality development of rural regions. This issue is particularly acute in the Loess Plateau area, where the complex topography leads to scattered and independent village layouts, making it challenging to allocate service facilities based simply on distance and population. Aiming to arrange public service facilities efficiently and intensively from a “bottom-up” approach, this study, from the perspective of living circles, attempts to summarize the current usage and needs of villagers at the “village–town–county” levels, as well as to seek strategies for facility allocation in villages. This provides a scientific basis for optimizing the configuration of service facilities in the Loess Plateau area. Through field surveys based on questionnaires and interviews with over 60 households and more than 100 villagers, this study authentically reproduces a picture of their daily lives and summarizes their needs for well-configured services and facilities. The findings of this study include the following: (1) The village domain serves as a space of daily production and living for villagers, necessitating facilities for everyday purchases, activities, and elderly care; the town domain supplements the daily production and living needs of villagers, with a higher demand for production materials; the county domain, integrating urban and rural spaces, provides higher-level medical, educational, and other service facilities. (2) Within the village domain, villagers’ demands for facilities lean towards miniaturization and integration. With the increasingly aging population, the demand for elderly care and health facilities is becoming more urgent. Facilities such as activity rooms, fitness equipment, and stores with a wide range of products at reasonable prices can effectively improve levels of convenience and happiness in villagers’ lives. This study summarizes, from a “bottom-up” approach, the villagers’ facility layout needs within the rural living circle, providing a scientific basis for establishing a human-centered rural living circle and enhancing the quality of rural living environments.

Physical Activity Policy, Systems, and Environment Change Through Extension SNAP-Ed: A Multistate Perspective.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) provides nutrition education and support for healthy living in SNAP-qualifying communities. SNAP-Ed supports policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) efforts to make the healthy choice an easier choice. SNAP-Ed implementers have widely adopted healthy eating PSE supports. However, physical activity (PA) PSE strategies are less common, with limited awareness between states of how other SNAP-Ed implementers approach PA-focused PSE work. Physical Activity Policy, Research, and Evaluation Network (PAPREN) Rural Active Living Workgroup project members sought to explore how Extension-based SNAP-Ed implements PA-focused PSE approaches. A sample of Extension-based SNAP-Ed program (n = 8) leaders were purposefully recruited from eligible universities in six of the seven SNAP-Ed regions. An interview guide to systematically collect information about current Extension SNAP-Ed implementation focused on PA PSE strategies was developed iteratively by the PAPREN Rural Active Living Workgroup Extension PA PSE project team. PA PSE Extension SNAP-Ed implementation efforts occurred at the state, county, and community levels and/or within local organizations. PA PSEs included school PA policy change, shared-use agreements, active transportation promotion, park development, walking challenges, and PA-promoting signage. All interviews highlighted the importance of partnerships at local, county, and state levels for PSE efforts. Extension-based SNAP-Ed shows potential to bring community partners together to plan and implement PA-focused PSE approaches. With a focus on SNAP-eligible people and substantial geographic reach, Extension SNAP-Ed is uniquely situated as a public health partner to broadly implement PA PSE changes.

Study on Mental Health of Urban and Rural Living Transgender

This study is an attempt to examine the Mental Health of Urban and Rural living Transgender. Transgender‟s living in urban and rural areas were selected for this research. Total number of sample was 70. Sample was divided into 2 parts 35 transgender from urban living and 35 transgender from rural living in West Bengal. There are 6 dimensions are used to find out the levels of mental health. The data was collected by using the Mental Health Inventory (MHI) Dr. Jagdish and Dr. A.K. Srivastava. Six dimensions were used to find out the level of mental health. The urban living Transgender‟s mental health mean= 149.11 and SD= 21.18 show that there mental health level is poor, while the rural living Transgender‟s mental health mean = 147.06 and SD= 20.89 show that there mental health level is also poor. Findings show that their mental health is in a bad state due to too much rejection, isolation, harshness, hearing derogatory words. May be this study will be helpful for the government for making the polices and enhancing their living, their acceptance from the society, good facilities and better life in ground level work.

Research Status, Hotspots, and Trend Analysis of the Rural Living Environment Upgrade in China from 1992 to 2022: A Bibliometric and Narrative Review Analysis

The rural living environment is the foundation of rural ecology and rural residents’ life, and the quality of the rural living environment is directly related to the green and low-carbon development of rural areas and the physical and mental health of rural residents. This article aims to grasp the current situation and of rural living environment improvement research and its various research hotspots, explore research frontiers and trends, and provide crucial theoretical guidance for rural living environment improvement research by searching and analyzing China’ national knowledge infrastructure database (CNKI). The article adopts CiteSpace6.2 bibliometric software and the narrative review method to analyze 1349 papers on rural living environment upgrading in CNKI from 1992 to 2022. Among them, the narrative review collects and analyzes the relevant information on rural living environment improvement to provide the background and content for the relevant arguments. It is found that (1) the rural living environment governance policies can be divided into four stages, namely, the initial stage, policy exploration, policy enhancement, and policy deepening, with the policy system continuously maturing and the governance content becoming clearer; (2) research hot topics can be summarized as research on the connotation and governance model of the rural living environment, research on development status, research on effective evaluation and influential factors, and research on treatment model and technology involving interdisciplinary integration development; (3) the rural living environment upgrade research history can be divided into three periods: before 2004, which was the start-up stage, thus the number of publications was relatively small, and core topics included the transformation of rural toilets and rural domestic sewage treatment; 2004–2017, which is the expansion stage, thus the total amount of literature is increasing yearly, and the research topics are gradually enriched; after 2018, which is the the mature development stage, further clarifying the key tasks of rural living environment upgrades; (4) in the future, it is necessary to keep the focus on research in the four key areas, deepen the research on governance connotation, influential factors, and effect evaluation, explore the typical models of rural living environment construction in China, and provide research guidelines and practical decisions for rural living environment governance.

The Dilemma and Practice Paths of Multi-entity Participation in the Rural Living Environment—A Case Study of District Y in Chongqing

The remediation of the rural living environment is not only an important aspect of comprehensively promoting rural revitalization but also directly influences the villagers’ sense of happiness and attainment. This paper, taking District Y in Chongqing as an example, explores the practice paths of multi-entity coordinated governance in the rural living environment. The paper affirms the leading role of the government, participation responsibilities of the market, social organizations, and villagers, thereby constructing a multi-entity coordinated governance mechanism to effectively address the prominent problems currently faced.

Beyond transformations: Zooming in on agricultural digitalization and the changing social practices of rural farming in Northern Ghana, West Africa

Digitalization of agriculture (DA) has emerged as a powerful rural transformative force. However, the dynamics of how digitalization is changing smallholder farming practices at the heart of rural life remain underexplored. Here, we employ a mixed-method approach (1565 survey respondents, 16 focus group discussions, and 22 interviews) to examine farmers' experiences with digital agriculture services in Northern Ghana through a social practice theory (SPT) lens. We found that farmers perceive digitalization as transitioning their everyday activities across the farming spectrum, including decisions and activities related to season planning, planting, husbandry, harvesting, post-harvest management, and sales. Notably, 1) new materials of phones and digital platforms redefine farmers’ knowledge and competencies, ultimately 2) temporary re-patterning their routines and rhythms. Therefore, we argue that, beyond the contested claims of digital transformations, a pertinent dimension of DA and rural social change is the transitions in the everyday practices of farmers and rural living. Our paper, as we know, is among the early attempts to theoretically and empirically examine agriculture digitalization through an explicit practice lens, and more so in the context of African smallholder systems. We contribute to the scholarship on DA and rural change by (re)framing the dynamics of the phenomenon through everyday practices. By this approach we aim to steer the DA discourse and policy from the optimistic rural transformations towards the often-overlooked yet critical gradual changes and transitions in the day-to-day life of farmers.

Countermeasures for Improving Rural Living Environments under the Background of a Rural Revitalization Strategy Based on Computer Virtualization Technology

The all around construction and development of rural areas not only promotes the economic promotion of rural areas and the optimization and adjustment of various industrial structures, but also leads to the deterioration of rural living environments. There is a close relationship between the planning and design of residential buildings and the living environment, which can integrate human life and architecture into a whole. Virtualization technology is a new technology developed in recent years, which integrates computer graphics, multimedia, digital image processing, and other technologies. In this paper, a virtual building model of a rural residential environment based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) is constructed, and the virtual reconstruction of the residential environment is realized by extracting the bottom features of images. The experimental results show that, compared with the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, the accuracy of the proposed human settlements modeling method is improved by 27.85%. This model can effectively solve the problem of unclear and not stereo images, and at the same time keep the clarity of the virtual reconstruction images of buildings, which can provide theoretical support for the improvement of the rural living environment under the background of a rural revitalization strategy.

A Bibliometric Review of Rural Living Environment Improvement Research in China Based on CNKI Database: 1992–2022

Improving the rural living environment has become one of the hot issues in the study of rural revitalization in China. Based on 972 high-quality journal articles, in the database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), this paper provides a detailed bibliometric review of research on the improvement of the rural living environment in China, from 1992 to 2022. Based on a descriptive statistical analysis of the publication trends, authors, institutions, source journals, and high-frequency keywords of the sample literature, this paper uses cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis to quantitatively analyze the main research fields, hot topics, and improvement directions. The results show, that the study of the improvement of the rural living environment presents a good trend. The main research include six aspects: rural sewage improvement, rural waste management, rural environment collaborative treatment, rural toilet improvement, new rural construction and management, and rural environmental green development. Among them, the research heat and abundance of research results of the first three, is higher than the latter three. To further deepen the research related to the rural living environment improvement in the future, issues such as rural toilet improvement, new rural construction and governance, and green development of rural environment, need more attention.

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

지속가능한 농촌 리빙랩

Living Labs are spaces for innovative and participative research, development and activities that use multidisciplinary approaches and promote the co-creation paradigm. The main aim of this paper is therefore to put Living Labs in the context of rural areas and evaluate their possible contributions for sustainable rural development. This study analyzed the prototyping cases of cardamom dryer, cooking stove and farm reservoir design with the topic of sustainable living in rural areas in India. The research method was as follows. First, the selected living lab cases were explained according to the innovation development process. Second, the 20 evaluation criteria of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) were mapped to the components of the Extended Business Model Canvas (EBMC). Third, the characteristics of Urban Living Lab were presented by grouping in the components of the Extended EBMC. And, based on the suggested characteristics, we offer a Proposition for the sustainable development of an Rural Living Lab.

The Realization Mechanism of Rural Multi-Value Comes from Rural Living Environment Improvement in Mountainous Areas of Western China

The Realization Mechanism of Rural Multi-Value Comes from Rural Living Environment Improvement in Mountainous Areas of Western China

Towards Improving Rural Living Environment for Chinese Cold Region Based on Investigation of Thermal Environment and Space Usage Status

In recent years, many scholars worldwide have carried out research related to the relationship between the construction of rural dwellings and the indoor thermal environment in response to the issue of building sustainability. China’s rural revitalization has developed rapidly in recent years. Although previous research showed that the poor indoor thermal environment of vernacular dwellings has negative effects on residents’ thermal comfort and health, it is poorly studied in terms of residents’ space usage habits, their thermal comfort satisfaction, and their thermal sensation. Linyi, the largest and most populous city in Shandong, China, was selected as the research area to investigate the thermal environment and space usage by using in-depth questionnaire interviews and systematical measurements. The results show that there are seasonal differences in space usage in a typical vernacular dwelling. The field measurements show that the indoor temperature is 0–5 °C in winter if there is no heating and 26 °C in summer. By comprehensive comparison, it is found that there is a contradiction between residential space usage and the functional layout; residents choose to use rooms with worse thermal conditions in winter. The analysis of the questionnaires shows that residents have higher satisfaction with the indoor thermal environment in summer than in winter, and the thermal comfort range of residents is 23.3~30 °C in summer and 11.25~17.5 °C in winter. Additionally, the neutral thermal temperature of the indoor space is 26.7 °C in summer and 14.4 °C in winter. Although residents have better adaptability to the cold climate, the measurement data in winter are still beyond the comfort range. We suggest that these results can be used as a reference and data base for improving the living environment of rural vernacular dwellings in Chinese cold regions.

Multidimensional Evaluation of the Quality of Rural Life Using Big Data from the Perspective of Common Prosperity.

Evaluating and revealing the spatial differentiations of quality of rural life (QRL) is the basis for formulating rural revitalization planning to promote rural transformation and achieve common prosperity. Taking the Lin'an District of Hangzhou city in China, an economically developed mountainous area, as an example, this study explored the connotation of QRL from the perspective of common prosperity and constructed a QRL evaluation framework involving living, employment, consumption, and leisure aspects. Then, based on multi-sourced data of 270 administrative villages as the assessment unit, we revealed the spatial patterns of QRL and proposed optimization paths to improving QRL. The results showed that (1) differences in the spatial distribution of quality of rural living, employment, consumption, and leisure of Lin'an District were significant, presenting stepped, block clustering, irregularity, and scattered patterns, respectively. (2) The overall QRL was mainly at a low level, clustered spatially, distributed in a strip pattern, and with obvious road directionality. (3) Based on the evaluation results of QRL, we divided the 270 administrative villages into six types of improvement: livability, employment, consumption, leisure, and balanced and lagged development types. This study could provide a scientific cognitive basis for the improvement of QRL and a useful reference for rural revitalization in China.