With the great outdoors just out the back door, staying physically active in rural communities might sound easy. But research shows that people living in rural communities are at greater risk for obesity and other health conditions associated with an inactive lifestyle.
Past research on health and wellness in cities and suburbs has often produced conclusions that are a poor fit for rural towns.
David Hartley, director of the Maine Rural Health Research Center at U. Southern Maine, said that adding sidewalks and bike paths so children can exercise on their way to school makes sense in cities, but those aren’t realistic options in a rural town where the school is on the outskirts.
Rural living is often associated with quality of life and access to outdoor recreation, yet the reality is that people living in rural communities have limited access to health care, commercial exercise facilities and community or corporate physical activity programs.
Communities in rural areas have fewer resources to support healthy active living, thus leading residents to be more prone to develop conditions associated with inactivity, such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity, according to research lead by professor Deborah John at Plymouth State U.
“We need to do a better job of making the healthy choices the easy choices,” she said. “And it’s important to get input from the people who live in rural areas rather than try to impose some outside notion of what should be done.”
John earned her Ph.D. from Oregon State U. in exercise and sport science, sport and exercise psychology, with a minor in gender studies.
Her research interests in the past have included investigations into the psychological influence of women’s physical activity behaviors and exercise involvement during the menopause transitional period, as well as a multi method project to gain greater understanding of the concept of objectified body consciousness.
She joined the Plymouth State faculty in the fall of 2004 and now is an assistant professor at OSU’s Extension Family and Community Development Program in Oregon City.
In 2008, along with fellow Plymouth State faculty and students, John created the Partners Enabling Active Rural Living Project with the help and support of New Hampshire Congressman Paul Hodes.
Federal funding secured the project for research aimed at measuring physical activity levels of community members, examining community-level resources and creating a model for physical activity promotion specific to rural communities.
The primary objective of the PEARL grant established the Center for Active Living and Healthy Communities at Plymouth State.
“It’s one thing to go into a community and do research, it’s another thing to get the people who live there to help do the research,” said Barbara McCahan, director for the Center for Active Living and Healthy Communities at Plymouth State. “The people were actually generating the information.”
In March of 2009, researchers invited residents of three rural New England communities to document environmental features that either enable or act as barriers to active living in their town, as part of the PEARL Project.
With the use of a new technology developed by researchers at the U. Wisconsin-Madison called participatory photo mapping, John and her students created an “active living” map of the community.