Community Correlates of Rural Youth Violence

Research limited to large urban areas leaves out as much of the U.S. population as it captures. According to the 1990 census (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1992), only 49 percent of the U.S. population lives in urbanized areas of 500,000 or more, 25 percent lives in fully rural settings (i.e., places with populations of no more than 2,500), and another 12 percent lives in towns or cities of fewer than 50,000 population. (The remaining 14 percent lives in midsized urban areas with populations between 50,000 and 500,000.) Although overall crime rates are higher in urban than in rural areas (Maguire and Pastore, 1995), this difference is not as large as is widely assumed, and crime rates in small towns and rural areas vary considerably.