Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons^™

Rurality And The Opioid Crisis In U.S. Counties : A Spatiotemporal Investigation, Feinuo Sun

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Previous studies on the opioid crisis in the United States at the subnational level rarely consider temporal and spatial dependency simultaneously. Under the theoretical framework of spatial inequality, this dissertation aims to understand how the uneven development of the opioid crisis across the rural-urban spectrum has been constructed and evolved from 2006 to 2018. Based on a new continuous measure of rurality, a spatiotemporal dataset is assembled based on the Multiple-Cause-of-Deaths File and other federal data sources, such as the U.S. Opioid Dispensing Map and the American Community Survey. The methods include geographical mapping, fixed effects modeling, and spatial panel …