April 29, 2025

May 9 webinar to explore key findings

(April 24, 2025)  A new data initiative by the Regional Rural Development Centers has produced an open access dataset available to all researchers nationally. Collected in a groundbreaking, multi-region Baseline Survey 2024, the household-level dataset establishes a baseline to inform policy decisions, community development strategies, and targeted interventions related to regional challenges and opportunities. A webinar on May 9, 2025, at 3:00 pm (ET) will explore key preliminary findings from the survey data.

The Baseline Survey 2024 conducted in the North Central, Southern, and Northeast regions was developed by faculty from NCRCRD, SRDC, and Auburn University. The survey covers topics related to household, business, and community well-being and the conditions, issues, and challenges faced by rural and urban communities and their residents in each region. The Western Rural Development Center (WRDC) will conduct the same survey later this year. When completed, the Baseline Survey 2024 open access data will be available for the entire United States. 

Building on NCRCRD’s initial North Central Region household survey conducted in 2022 (NCR-Stat: Baseline 2022), the Baseline Survey 2024 contained questions from the original survey’s broad spectrum of topics as well as questions on new topics such as the recreation economy, perceptions and impacts of extreme weather, and residents’ intentions to move or stay and the reasons behind those decisions.

Zuzana Bednarik, NCRCRD Research and Extension Specialist who led the survey’s development and implementation shared, “We sought to develop these three, open access datasets to help researchers, Extension specialists and educators, policy makers, and economic development practitioners to better understand trends in the individual regions and their states.”

The NERCRD funded the administration of the survey in the Northeast region. Center Director Stephan J. Goetz noted that, “with deliberate sample weighting, the survey is highly representative of rural areas in the Northeast, which are often underrepresented because of their smaller populations. We are already examining the data to better understand households’ reasons for leaving rural areas, for example. In future work we will examine the role that the recreational economy can play in rural economic development.”

All three open access Baseline 2024 datasets reside individually on the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), and are available to researchers nationally. All surveys were conducted in 2024. Total respondents (for all three surveys) were 14,094.

• NCR-Stat: Baseline 2024 (North Central Region)
  Survey respondents: 4,383
  https://purr.purdue.edu/publications/4791/1
• SR-Stat: Baseline 2024 (Southern Region)
  Survey respondents: 5,500
  https://purr.purdue.edu/publications/4794/1
• NER-Stat: Baseline 2024 (Northeast Region)
  Survey respondents: 4,211
  https://purr.purdue.edu/publications/4793/1

Upcoming webinar will introduce the multi-region household surveys:
The webinar hosted by the survey developers on May 9, 2025, at 3:00 pm (ET) will explore key findings from the NCR-Stat, SR-Stat, and NER-Stat Baseline 2024 survey data.
Information and registration: https://ncrcrd.ag.purdue.edu/webinars/

Other regional surveys conducted by the RRDCs include the NCR-Stat: Baseline 2022,the NCR-Stat: Caregiving, theNER-Stat: Caregiving, andthe NCR-Stat: Small Business.

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The Regional Rural Development Centers (RRDCs) are regionally focused centers funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to link research with Extension/outreach in the areas of rural economic development, forming a one-stop-shop connection to the nationwide network of Land-Grant college and university researchers, educators, and practitioners.