Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5727-0698

Date Available

5-15-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Sociology

Faculty

Julie Zimmerman

Faculty

Carrie Oser

Faculty

Anthony Bardo

Abstract

American life expectancy continues to diverge from most developed nations. Literature spanning several fields of scholarship has documented an uneven distribution of life expectancy between social groups and across geographic contexts. Frameworks such as “Deaths of Despair” and the rural mortality penalty describe the declining health trends among working class whites and rural America. But, conceptual development around these frameworks is still limited. This dissertation utilizes a rural sociological approach to bridging the gap between the Deaths of Despair framework and the rural mortality penalty by examining violent death patterns across diverse rural contexts. In doing so, I incorporate several strands of literature to synthesize a more structural understanding of the life chances and resource decline faced by the white working class and rural populations, and I connect violent death to the DoD framework. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the rural mortality penalty and DoD literature, and ultimately, the ongoing conversation on the geography of American life expectancy. Through two empirical chapters, I explore how weakening opportunity structures across rural contexts foster conditions of hopelessness and violence: 1) the first examines suicide and homicide rates across rural contexts to shed critical light upon the utility of the Deaths of Despair (DoD) framework for the rural mortality penalty literature, and 2) the second describes how the impacts of spatial inequality accumulate and produce greater levels of violent death in rural America. To examine violent death, this dissertation uses data from the Restricted Access Data of the National Violent Death Reporting System, linked to Urban Influence Codes and County Typology Codes from the Economic Research Service at the USDA. A third conceptual chapter utilizes the spatial inequality framework to consider the unique challenges faced in rural data analyses with an emphasis on several forms of rural data inequality.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.176

Funding Information

National Institute of Social Sciences 2022

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