Intimate Partner Violence in Small Towns, Dispersed Rural Areas, and Other Locations: Estimates Using a Reconception of Settlement Type

Current understanding of victimization of those in rural settlements compared to other types of settlements is limited by inadequate classifications of settlement types. The typical approach—one based on the incorrect use of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s classification of metropolitan areas—may mask important variations in the incidence of violent victimization, and in part explain mixed results related to this issue. To investigate this, we detail problems with following the typical approach, and then describe an alternative measure of settlement type. We next use this alternative settlement type measure to estimate the incidence of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women from 1992–2015 National Crime Victimization Survey data. Over the period examined, the incidence of IPV was highest for women living in small towns (11.4 per 1,000). In contrast, women living in dispersed rural settlements (7.9 per 1,000) shared rates with those in suburbs (7.9 per 1,000) and exurbs (7.1 per 1,000) while reporting rates lower than those of women residing in the urban core (9.7 per 1,000). These results provide clarity to earlier research on the incidence of IPV across settlement types and they call into question the salience of geographic isolation as a determinant of IPV in nonmetropolitan locales.