Public directory data sources do not accurately characterize the food environment in two predominantly rural states.

Communities are being encouraged to develop locally based interventions to address environmental risk factors for obesity. Online public directories represent an affordable and easily accessible mechanism for mapping community food environments, but may have limited utility in rural areas. The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of public directories vs rigorous onsite field verification to characterize the community food environment in 32 geographically dispersed towns from two rural states covering 1,237.

Smart density: A more accurate method of measuring rural residential density for health-related research.

Background: Studies involving the built environment have typically relied on US Census data to measure residential density. However, census geographic units are often unsuited to health-related research, especially in rural areas where development is clustered and discontinuous.

Objective: We evaluated the accuracy of both standard census methods and alternative GIS-based methods to measure rural density.