Life-Course Transitions in Rural Residence and Old-Age Mortality in Iowa, 1930–2014

Abstract

We thank the participants in the "Growing up in Rural America" workshop, the editors, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. We particularly thank Reviewer 2 for constructive engagement with the paper and concrete suggestions for improvement. We thank the University of Minnesota Office of the Vice President for Research for supporting data collection through a Grant in Aid (#23111), and gratefully acknowledge support from the Minnesota Population Center (P2C HD041023) funded through a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Shannyn Telander and Leah Engelman provided valuable exemplary research assistance with the record linkage. We thank the subjects of the Iowa Women's Health Study for their participation in many waves of data collection.

Growing Up in Rural America

“…Crosssectional studies typically ignore these selection effects in migration; yet excluding these rural migrants can generate biased estimates of the longer-term effects of growing up in rural areas. Roberts, Rahn, and Lazovich (2022) and Parker, Tach, and Robertson (2022), for example, both find important differences in adult mortality and economic outcomes between rural stayers and movers in their studies.…”

“…For example, being born on a farm in the early twentieth century is associated with living a longer and healthier life. However, women who grew up and stayed in a nonfarm rural area had the worst mortality outcomes (Roberts, Rahn, and Lazovich 2022). In addition, young adults who grew up in rural areas are not "less wealthy," although they have different types of wealth (Keister, Moody, and Wolff 2022).…”