Appalachia, Usa: An Empirical Note and Agenda for Future Research *

Abstract

For over a century, scholars, politicians, and various other stakeholders have attempted to draw the physical bounds of an American Appalachian region (e.g., Fenneman 1916; Shapiro 1978; Gatrell and Fintor 1998; Williams 2002). Like many comparable efforts, the reasons for regionalization in Appalachian studies range from classification and description (e.g., Moore 2005), to planning, governance, and social activism (e.g., Strickland 1999; Wimberley 2010), and to framing or facilitating scientific inquiry (e.g., Cooper et al. 2011). Simply put, the act of partitioning continuous space into discrete components allows users to abstract away from some innumerable complexities and heterogeneities that otherwise stand in the way of describing, explaining, predicting, and controlling parts of the real world. In this sense, well-defined regional boundaries play a large role in furthering the scientific enterprise. Simultaneously, however, the process of drawing regional bright-lines that separate one kind of space or phenomenon from another is often complex and nebulous-if not impossible (Smith 2015)-especially when the region of interest is social or cultural in its constitution. These circumstances seem to generate two oppositional tendencies. First, they set the stage for multiple competing theoretical conceptualizations of a given ideational region. Second, they likely increase the demand for a standardized or official operational definition of that region with which to facilitate empirical research across time and academic disciplines.These two counter-tendencies have animated much of the discourse on the location(s) and characteristics of in the United States. While comparatively theoretically-oriented work in cultural geography (e.g., Ulack and Raitz 1982), anthropology (e.g., Batteau 1990), rural sociology (e.g., Billings 2007), political science (e.g., Fisher 2010), history (e.g., Shapiro 1978), and other disciplines has emphasized the socially constructed and unbounded nature of Appalachia, empirical research on the region-despite engaging with these same issues from similar disciplinary perspectives-is often forced [by analytical methods and data availability] to operationalize Appalachia as a bounded spatial unit that either does or does not contain certain phenomena of interest (e.g., Alexander and Berry 2010; Cooper et al. 2011). Within this literature, perhaps the most widely used spatial representation of Appalachia is the definition established by the federal Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in the 1960s for targeting its anti-poverty programs (e.g., Williams 2002; Moore 2005; Alexander and Berry 2010; Cooper et al. 2011; Joshi and Gebremedhin 2012). The present research note highlights some pitfalls that are possible when this political/administrative definition functions as a study area in quantitative social science research on Appalachia.Questioning the relevance of the ARC borders is not a novel contribution to Appalachian studies (e.g., Watts 1978; Strickland 1999; Williams 2002), not even to its quantitative branch (e.g., Cooper et al. 2011). That being said, this research note goes beyond simple questioning to illustrate, empirically, through exploratory spatial data analysis, mismatches between the ARC boundaries and common (measurable) perceptions of Appalachia. Importantly, the goal here is not to discover or propose a new set of boundaries that somehow captures Appalachia better than the ARC's or any other existing delineation of the region. Rather, what follows is merely an attempt to understand how adopting the ARC boundaries as a study area in empirical investigations of Appalachia might affect the findings and implications of those analyses. Toward that end, the research note draws on geospatial (1) socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census Bureau, (2) physiographic data from the U.S. Geological Survey, Sayre et al. (2014), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and (3) business data from Esri, to perform a series of geovisualization and spatial analytical operations. …

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