Our Survey Methods

The Covid-19 Rural West Survey was developed by researchers at Yale University, Utah State University, and New York University, and funded by the National Science Foundation (Award # 2029990: “RAPID: Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic on Rural Attitudes about Federal Aid and Recovery”). The survey was fielded by FM3 Research. The data in this executive summary are based on a representative survey of 1,009 residents of rural counties in the western United States.

The survey was conducted from June 25 to July 22, 2020, amidst the height of the summer spike in cases. Survey respondents are from rural West counties, defined as the counties classified as non-metropolitan by the Office of Management and Budget, from the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming. The survey was dual-mode, using both phone and internet surveys, and address-based, locating respondents randomly by address.

We offered the survey in English and Spanish. The survey oversampled for hard-to-reach groups including Native Americans, Latino/as, and young adults. To ensure the data was representative to the population of sample counties, these results have been weighted by gender, age, ethnicity, education, and state. Our weighted sample mirrors the makeup of the rural West. About half of the sample is Republican, followed by 25% identifying as Democrat. It is majority white (78%), followed by 6% racially “Other,” 6% mixed race, and 4% Native American. Latino/as make up 15% of the sample. A little more than a third of respondents (34%) have at least a two-year college degree. Like the rural West, the samples skews older, with 20% over 65 and 29% between 50 and 64.

The margin of sampling error is ±3.1% at the 95% confidence level. Election proportions come from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab dataset “County Presidential Election Returns 2000-2016”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ.