About the Project
The Rural Data Project
Transforming Rural Data to Information, Statistics, and Knowledge
About the RESEARCHERS
The CARI+ was co-developed by Tomoko McGaughey and Paul Peters of the Spatial Determinants of Health Lab in the Department of Health Sciences, Carleton University.
Tomoko McGaughey (MPH) is a researcher focusing on health inequalities and access to health services from a geographic perspective. She has published recent research in Scientific Data, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and Canadian Geographies. See Tomoko’s Google Scholar profile for the latest publications.
Paul Peters (PhD) is an Associate Professor at Carleton University in the Department of Health Sciences and Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and is the Academic Director of the Carleton University Research Data Centre (CU-RDC). His research is varied, but is tied by the application of health and social statistics, the use of linked administrative and survey data, and by the development of geographic methods in health. See Paul’s Google Scholar profile for the latest publications.
CARI+ Datasets, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and content on Rural Data have been produced with the assistance of numerous others in our research lab, listed on our complete acknowledgements page.
Spatial Determinants of Health Lab
Health is not distributed randomly. It is shaped by where people live, work, and age — and by the social and structural forces that make some places healthier than others. The Spatial Determinants of Health Lab at Carleton University studies these relationships through the lens of health geography, using spatial theory and quantitative methods to understand how place, inequality, and health intersect across Canada.
Our current research spans four interconnected themes: health and care service access in rural communities; geography and mental health; environmental exposures and neurodevelopmental disorders; and multiple-cause-related mortality by income and geography. Our research across these themes is connected via a focus on quantitative methods and the development of novel measurement approaches, analytic tools, and new data sources. Across these projects, our team works with complex Statistics Canada microdata in the Carleton Research Data Centre, develops interactive geospatial visualizations, and promotes open science through open-access datasets and code libraries.
For more information on our other research projects, visit our lab website at Carleton University.
The CARI+ In plain language
Rurality and remoteness are policy-relevant concepts for planning and evaluating equitable access to services across Canada, yet existing measures rely on categorical, urban-centric and coarse spatial definitions that obscure variation in accessibility across the rural–urban continuum.
The Canadian Accessibility and Remoteness Index Plus (CARI+) is a small-area accessibility index at the dissemination-area (DA) level based on road-network travel to stratified service centres, including population centres and 24-hour emergency departments stratified by settlement-size. An overall rurality score is produced, then normalized to an index between 0 and 1 and classified via multiple methods.
The CARI+ produces an even population distribution across categories of rurality, revealing socio-demographic gradients in material deprivation and Indigenous identity that increase with remoteness, while educational attainment and immigrant representation decline. In very remote areas, CARI+ identifies 25% Indigenous residents and 27% of the population with less than high school education, versus 78% and over 50% respectively under the other rural measures.
CARI+ provides a transparent, service-specific, high-resolution measure of accessibility that addresses key limitations of existing Canadian indices and supports nuanced analysis for health and social service planning.