Texas A&M study finds rural Americans are less likely to follow COVID-19 guidelines than urban Americans

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) - Researchers at Texas A&M conducted a study that found rural Americans are less likely to follow COVID-19 guidelines than urban Americans.

The study found that rural residents were significantly less likely to wear a mask, sanitize their homes or workplaces, avoid dining out, or work from home. Researchers looked at eight different preventative behaviors the CDC has recommended people perform to help reduce the spread of the virus.

“What we were trying to do in this study is understand whether or not the behavior of the American public was consistent across the population, or whether or not the adoption of those behaviors varied,” Texas A&M Department of Health Policy & Management Assistant Professor Timothy Callaghan said. “We were specifically interested in whether rural and urban Americans differed.”

Callaghan says there are two driving factors he thinks could help explain the study’s findings.

“People in rural America tend to be a little bit more conservative. The Trump administration and others on the Republican right have at various times downplayed the severity of the virus,” Callaghan said. “Conservative individuals across the country are going to listen to that message and might take things like wearing a mask less seriously.”

Another key piece, Callaghan says, is the fact that rural communities tend to be more spread out.

“They’re not as concerned as being densely packed together for the possibility of spread to happen,” Callaghan said. “That could also help to explain why rural Americans are less likely to adopt public health guidance. They’re not riding a bus with 30 or 40 other people every day to get to work.”

The study also found other personal characteristics that correlated with a higher or lesser likelihood of listening to public health guidelines. For example, older Americans, those who are more highly educated, and women were more likely to adopt certain behaviors. Those who said they trusted experts or were worried about contracting the virus were also more likely to follow guidelines.

“We find that women are significantly more likely to social distance, sanitize, and cancel social events or avoid dining out at restaurants and bars,” Callaghan said. “Women aren’t more likely to adopt every single one of the preventative behaviors, but they certainly are more likely to adopt some than others compared to men.”

Since spread is also occurring in rural areas, experts say they need to find more effective ways of messaging so people are more likely to follow COVID-19 guidelines.

”What sorts of messages are going to be effective in convincing rural Americans to adopt more of these preventative behaviors,” Callaghan said. “I think it really comes down to a need for more research. We need more research to understand both what messages are going to be most effective, as well as what messengers. If one of the reasons that individuals are less willing to adopt some of these behaviors is because they’re not very trusting of science or they don’t believe COVID-19 is very serious, you might want to convey to them the seriousness COVID-19 and the importance of those preventative behaviors to preventing COVID-19.”

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