Lack of awareness or recognition of homelessness The June issue of In Focus provides a synthesis of recent literature on rural homelessness. Homelessness is often conceptualized as an urban issue, which is reflected by the dearth of research on homelessness in rural areas. In reality, homelessness is pervasive in rural communities due to high rates of poverty, unemployment or underemployment, l...

Agriculture is the backbone of India’s economy as two-third of the population live in rural areas and directly or indirectly depend on agriculture for their livelihood. India’s food production has improved significantly during the last three decades due to all-round efforts but Indian agriculture is still facing a multitude of problems to maximize productivity to feed the continuously increasin...

G restrictions on the rights of banks to open branches and establish offices across state lines have been relaxed throughout the nation since the early 1980s. During the 1980s and early 1990s, many states relaxed controls over branching by banks located within their borders, and almost all of them permitted some form of regional interstate banking through acquisitions of banks by holding compan...

Bird species’ community responses to land use in the suburbanizing Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA, were contrasted among reserves, rural lands, and suburbs. For each land use type, bird composition, diversity, and abundance were recorded for 2 years in 99 plots in three sampling units (each 4500 ha). A habitat gradient defined by canopy structure (grasslands to savannas to forests) was influenced ...

BACKGROUND It is generally assumed that urban slum residents have worse health status when compared with other urban populations, but better health status than their rural counterparts. This belief/assumption is often because of their physical proximity and assumed better access to health care services in urban areas. However, a few recent studies have cast doubt on this belief. Whether slum dw...

OBJECTIVES As part of a larger case study exploring physician retention factors and strategies employed by rural communities, the objective of this analysis was to explore the community factors that promoted physician retention. METHODS A qualitative, collective case study design was employed to study four rural communities (cases) in Alberta that retained family physicians for four years or ...

Rural communities throughout the postindustrial world are in the midst of a significant transition, sometimes referred to as rural restructuring, as traditional land uses, economic activities, and social arrangements transition to those associated with ‘‘post-productivist’’ or ‘‘multifunctional’’ landscapes. Amenity migration, the movement of people based on the draw of natural and/or cultural ...