The concept of the food desert, an area with limited access to retail food stores, has increasingly been used within social scientific and public health research to explore the dimensions of spatial inequality and community well‐being. While research has demonstrated that food deserts are frequently characterized by higher levels of poverty and food insecurity, there has been relatively little research examining the relationship between food deserts and obesity, particularly in rural areas. In this article we use Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to identify food desert areas in rural Pennsylvania. We then analyze student body mass index (BMI) data along with census and school district‐level data to determine the extent to which the percentage of a school district's population residing within a food desert is positively associated with increased incidence of child overweight among students within the district. We find that school districts with higher percentages of populations located within food deserts are more likely to be structurally and economically disadvantaged. Net of these district‐level structural and economic characteristics, we additionally find a positive relationship between increased rates of child overweight and the percentage of the district population residing in a food desert.

Many scholars have commented on the changing significance of farming for understanding the dynamics of social and economic change in contemporary rural America. Quantitative analyses of relationships between farming, local socioeconomic conditions, demographic trends, and policy have often relied on an indicator of “farm‐dependent” (FD) counties developed by the USDA Economic Research Service. In this article, we argue that measures of economic dependency imperfectly identify the places in the United States where farming is significant, and can paint an incomplete picture of the contemporary geographic distribution and structure of agriculture in the United States. We propose an alternative categorical indicator—agricultural importance (AI)—that provides a better direct measure of the relative size and intensity of farming across diverse U.S. counties. We compare the characteristics of FD and AI counties along a set of dimensions and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each typology.

Abstract. The 2010 U.S. Decennial Census had a 4.6 percent net undercount for the population age 0 to 4 compared to a 0.1 percent over count for the total population. While the undercount of young children in the census has gotten considerable attention in recent years, less is known about the coverage of children in demographic surveys. In this paper, we analyze coverage rates by age, race, and Hispanic origin for three surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau -American Community Survey (ACS), Current Population Survey (CPS), and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). In addition, we estimate modified coverage rates to account for cumulative coverage error in both the survey and the census counts, which are used to calculate the coverage rates. The results show that young children tend to have lower coverage rates than other age groups. Coverage rates for young children in the ACS vary by race and Hispanic origin. The differences in coverage rates for young children in the CPS and SIPP by race and Hispanic origin were not statistically significant.

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