Kristin Lunz Trujillo - Rural Roots: Place-based Socialization, Conservatism, and Health Over the Lifespan

Scholars have documented widening differences in the health and political attitudes of rural and urban Americans. More recently, some have explored the role of rural identity, or the feeling that being a rural person is an important part of one’s identity, in shaping both the health and political behaviors of rural Americans. Previous research also suggests that rural identity persists in many people who grew up in a rural area but left to live elsewhere. However, less is known about the long-term influence of rural identity versus time-bound rural residency on rural identifiers’ health outcomes and political attitudes. Are the effects of rural identity maintained over the lifespan, even after one leaves a rural community? Do new residents of rural communities develop similar levels of rural identity-based health and political behaviors as those who have grown up in rural areas?  Using an original survey on rural childhood socialization as well as the Jennings-Stoker Socialization Panel, we show that adults who grew up in rural American communities–regardless of their current place of residence–are more likely to identify with the Republican Party and as conservatives, hold more conservative policy and dispositionally populist attitudes, and have worse health outcomes than those who grew up in more suburban and urban areas. Further, we find similar tendencies for gun ownership, and to a lesser extent, attitudes toward gun policy. These results imply that place-based socialization and rural cultural attachments appear to be stable and strong predictors of political behavior later in life. Further, a non-trivial number of non-rural Americans are impacted by rural socialization, with implications for the roots of Americans’ political behavior.
This project is co-authored with Michael Shepherd at the University of Michigan and Alee Lockman at Texas A&M.