In many evaluations of community interventions, the classifiers of “rural” and “urban” are used as proxies for access to resources and need for services, based on an assumed homogeneity of so-called “rural” communities. This presentation will encourage participants to think more broadly about the variation in rural communities. We demonstrate that employing geographic information systems and geospatial modeling can advance our conceptualization of rural, and allow us to use more refined measures in our evaluation work. Through the use of geospatial clustering techniques, we can develop more nuanced typologies of non-urban communities on continuums such as risk, need, and access. We will take participants step-by-step through how these approaches can be applied using publicly-available data sets and how they can be used to more fully characterize the variation in communities. Ultimately, these approaches can help us devise more appropriate interventions, target resources more efficiently, and improve our evaluations.#UniversityofArizona #DataVisualizationandReporting #GIS #2014Conference #Eval2014 #Presentation