While some people are born with a disability, most disability is acquired. This can happen suddenly by injury or slowly by chronic disease. Healing, disease course and medical treatment, underlying causes of disability, often fluctuate. This means people do not always report disability consistently over time. In order to understand urban/rural differences, RTC:Rural is conducting research to understand how disability evolves in rural and urban areas.
Bryce Ward, RTC:Rural Statistician, explains the project and its goals, and gives a quick progress update.

Map of 2015 OMB County Designations showing urban and rural counties across the United States. Click on the map for a full text description and for a larger, downloadable version. To browse or download the data this map was created with, use our Disability Counts Data Finder tool.
Map produced July 2017.