Table 4 Validity and reliability properties of rurality measures
Author and publication year | Name of the index | Reliability measures | Reliability score | Validity measures | Validity score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Department of Primary Industries and Energy, Department of Human Services and Health, 1994 [24] | Rural, remote and metropolitan area (RRMA) | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Weinert et al., 1995 [25] | MSU rurality index | test/re-test | 0.94 or larger | concurrent validity (comparison with other measure such as the participants’ perception) | R2 = 0.41, r = 0.85 and Z = 4.09 |
Leduc, 1997 [26] | General Practice Rurality Index (GPRI) | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Department of Health and Aged Care, 2001 [27] | Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA) | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Canberra, 2004 [28] | Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Swan et al., 2008 [29] | Clinical peripherality indicator | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Kralj, 2008 [11] | The Rurality Index for Ontario (RIO) | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
McGrail et al., 2009 [30] | the Index of Rural Access | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Han et al., 2012 [31] | Rural PHCWA index | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Humphreys et al., 2012 [13] | six-level geographical classification | not applicable | not applicable | concurrent validity | |
Steinhaeuser et al., 2014 [32] | modified RRS-Germany (mRRS-G) | Cronbach’s alpha | negative | convergent construct validity | factor analysis: R2 = 59.4% |
Mao et al., 2015 [33] | Individual-based rurality and well-being measures | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicabl |
Zhu et al., 2015 [34] | Rural taxonomy | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Inagami et al., 2016 [35] | IRR zip | not applicable | not applicable | face validity | not applicable |
Alasia et al., 2017 [36] | the index of remoteness | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Calovi et al., 2018 [37] | The spatial accessibility index | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
Doogan et al., 2018 [38] | Isolation scale | not applicable | not applicable | Spearman correlation to test convergent validity and the Akaike information criterion for criterion validity | Spearman correlation for convergent validity r = 0.99 |