The "Rural Matters" survey is being distributed to a random sample of rural Minnesota households in October, 2018. The survey team has defined "rural" relatively broadly, encompassing homes along dirt roads a mile from the closest neighbor to cities that have up to 50,000 people living in their metropolitan area. One of the purposes of the survey is ask people who live in areas of Minnesota outside of the major metropolitan regions (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Fargo/Moorhead, Duluth, Rochester, St. Cloud, and Mankato) about their perceptions of where they live and what they think of their communities.

The research team hypothesizes that there are both similarities and differences among rural Minnesotans that can be revealed by how people with different partisan affiliations, ideological preferences, racial and ethnic backgrounds, etc. perceive rural communities and rural living. This is important because politicians and the media tend to generalize about people living in rural areas without actually talking to them or trying to understand them.

While there have been surveys done both in Minnesota and outside the state that specifically focus on asking rural residents about themselves and their perceptions, very few of these adequately capture the important aspects of political values. Those that do tend to be major national surveys which do a poor job of separating clearly "urban" from "rural" voters and usually do not have a large enough "rural" sample to say anything meaningful about differences within that group. Other surveys that do a good job of focusing responses in rural areas are typically not focused on political values and attitudes.

This survey fills that gap and seeks to help Minnesotans better understand one another.