AIMS This study aimed to explore rural Australians' perceptions of social and cultural factors influencing alcohol use in their communities. METHODS Semi-structured interviews exploring rural community key informants' (n = 46) perceptions of social and cultural factors influencing alcohol consumption in their community were conducted. A narrative analysis identified cultural capital as a sali...

This paper, derived from The role and function of the rural nurse in Australia study, describes the effects of organisational change upon the rural nurses participating in the study. It appears that whilst change is an inevitable and regular feature of rural health service delivery, it does not necessarily benefit rural nurses or communities for reasons unique to rural life. Nurses in the study...

Medical education in Australia is currently entering a new era, including support for the significant extension of medical students and general practitioner (GP) registrars' training programs in rural communities. This commitment to rural medical student and general practitioner recruitment and retention has made the provision of accommodation in rural communities a vital issue. This study has ...

Rural populations experience higher rates of illness, less access to health care resources, and lower rates of health insurance coverage than do urban populations. A need exists to identify and address the health care needs of rural communities and other isolated populations and to contextualize the findings in the larger rural health environment. Critical ethnography combined with community-ba...

The article presents critical analysis of the state of the art in contemporary studies in social organization as factor affecting rural economic growth. We outline two major theoretical and methodological challenges that researchers have to face in order to progress further in understanding of the driving forces and obstacles to sustainable rural economic growth in developing societies. First, ...

History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies and we therefore lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a ...

introduction social security policies, and particularly the social insurance strategies, are awing important publicly supportive mechanisms to meet the communities’ social vulnerabilities. social insurance of rural people in iran has practically been conducted in recent years through the rural and nomadic social insurance fund. the widespread use of social insurance depends on the extent of its...