Urban/Rural Indicator in GSS Cycle 18

Question

I have a Professor here, who is using the GSS Cycle 18 – Victimization (2004), in a course with second year students. The students are performing various cross-tabulations and one of the independent variables they are being asked to include is the “Urban/Rural Indicator” (urind). Curiously, apart from “Urban” and “Rural”, another response option is for “Prince Edward Island”.

I believe this has to do with the sample, but the Professor was looking for an explanation as to why the PEI respondents were not included in one of the Urban or Rural responses. I have searched through the User’s Guide and other documentation for a rationale for this, but wasn’t able to locate anything.

Would there be some other documentation or explanation that could help clear this up?

Answer

"Here are some details for the inquiry about the specific variable in the PUMF for Rural/Urban. There are no CMAs in PEI and CMA is what is used to determine the urban-rural indicators.

Previous GSS PUMFs have sometimes included a rural/urban indicator called URIND (1=Urban, 2=Rural, 3=PEI). This derived variable is based on the UA_RA_TYPE geocodes (e.g. Cycle14).

For cycle 17 onwards , instead of URIND, a new rural/urban indicator (LUC_RST) was included as follows: The new variable is based on GEO_SAC_TYPE. The categories "CMA, CA tracted, CA untracted" are grouped into a new category “Larger Urban Centres”, and "Strong MIZ, Moderate MIZ, Weak MIZ and No MIZ" are grouped into a new category called “Rural and Small Town”. PEI is kept as a separate category.

LUC_RST
1 Larger Urban Centres (CMA/CA)
2 Rural and Small Town (non-CMA/CA)
3 PEI "

Rural and Urban Spaces in CMAs

Question

Students at UBC are trying to determine the area in square kilometers of the rural and urban parts of 10 census metropolitan areas for all censuses 1986-2006. All we can find in the published tables and in Geosuite is the total land area.

According to the census dictionary the rural areas of CMAs are designated the rural fringe. Is it at all possible to find the land area for the rural fringe as well as for the urban core and urban fringe?

Thanks for helping to clarify this.

Answer

I checked with our geography consultants and they indicated that this would be very difficult to do but provided provided following steps if the students wish to proceed:

"First, you would have to find the following spatial data layers. 1986, urban core, urban fringe, rural fringe (you would have to subtract urban from total CMA for this calculation); then you would have to find a water layer which was compatible with the 1986 spatial data layers in order to calculate the land area for the areas in question.

You would have to repeat this operation for 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 (and you would not be comparing the same area necessarily – due to changes in boundaries, scale and projection from one census to the next).

She also suggested the students could try breaking it down by CSDs. "