Health status and community resliency: What are the links?

Rural sustainability has been increasingly recognized as a noticeable issue for rural communities across Canada. It has often been discussed in relation to economic downturns, an increase in corporate farming including intensive livestock operations, migration of youth to urban locations, and urban centric policies that are not supportive of the rural lifestyle. More often rural communities are resource reliant or single industry towns that are particularly sensitive to external forces such as downturns in global markets. This multi-disciplinary study will address the meaning of community resiliency and the links between resiliency and health status in three Alberta communities: two rural and one urban. The two rural communities, are facing the challenges associated with economic changes and/or the location of industry. A qualitative case-study design will be employed. qualitative interviews will be conducted with 25-30 individuals in each of two rural communities and the urban centre over a period of three months. The acquisition of community-specific health, environmental and economic indicators, as well as historical accounts of the study communities, will be ongoing and will allow for testing the hypothesis that there is a link between health status and community resiliency.