Matthew Brooks, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, co-authored “Are Rural Areas Holdouts in the Second Demographic Transition? Evidence From Canada and the United States,” published in the journal Demography. Dr. Brooks worked alongside Shelley Clark, Ph.D., a Professor of Sociology at McGill University; Rachel Margolis, Ph.D., a Professor of Sociology at Western University; and Ann-Marie Helou, a doctoral student at McGill University. The following summary was written by Anya Finley (B.S. Political Science and Philosophy ’25).
Florida State University Assistant Professor of Sociology Matthew Brooks, Ph.D., co-authored “Are Rural Areas Holdouts in the Second Demographic Transition? Evidence From Canada and the United States,” published in Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America. The article examines how families living in rural areas of the United States are rapidly changing and increasingly becoming “untraditional” and how rural America’s declining economic profile drives these changes.
Dr. Brooks and co-authors found that over the past 30 years, rural women in both the United States and Canada have become more likely to cohabitate than urban women and that rural women are less likely to be married. They also found that more rural births happened outside of marriage than urban births.
“In the United States, these differences today are largely a product of rural America’s worse economic profile, such as lower levels of education and income,” Dr. Brooks said. “But in Canada, rural area’s lower proportion of immigration and racial minorities are the main factor.”
Dr. Brooks notes that this research shows that the commonly held view of rural families as being more “traditional,” might no longer hold true. “The family behaviors of rural women now more generally follow the patterns we expect from urban women, even more than the observed behaviors urban women do” Dr. Brooks explained. “This is significant not only because these family changes are the product of rural areas’ economic and demographic profiles but also because many rural schools, social services, and other institutions are operating under old assumptions of what rural families looked like and thus may be ill-prepared to help rural folks today.”
Previous research on changes in rural and urban families has focused on cross-national comparisons and how these patterns may follow demographic expectations. Less research has focused on comparing rural and urban families within the respective countries.
The lack of research on this topic may be due to the assumption that rural families are “traditional.” This “traditional” family structure can include things like high rates of marriage, large families, and childbirth happening within marriage. Dr. Brooks and co-authors note that the assumption of traditionality is rooted in rural areas’ socially conservative values. In contrast, urban families are assumed to be undergoing rapid change and becoming more diverse in size and structure.
“This leaves a significant knowledge gap, particularly since we know that economic inequality between rural and urban areas is on the rise, particularly in the United States,” Dr. Brooks said. In this study, we provide an in-depth analysis of family change in rural and urban areas of the United States and Canada and investigate what potentially drives rural-urban differences in the two countries today, focusing on the role of differences in demographics, socioeconomic status, and religiosity.”