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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1 This report uses the first sweep of the Growing up in Scotland ( GUS) study to explore what is distinctive about growing up in rural, remote and small-town Scotland in comparison with urban Scotland.

About the Growing Up in Scotland ( GUS) study

1.2 The Growing Up in Scotland study ( GUS) is an important new longitudinal research project aimed at tracking the lives of a cohort of Scottish children from the early years, through childhood and beyond. Its principal aim is to provide information to support policy-making, but it is also intended to be a broader resource that can be drawn on by academics, voluntary sector organisations and other interested parties.

1.3 GUS is based on a cohort or longitudinal design involving the recruitment of a 'panel' of children (and their families) who will be revisited on a number of occasions over an extended period of time. Members of the panel were identified in the first instance from Child Benefit records. Focusing initially on a cohort of 5,217 children aged 0-1 years old and a cohort of 2,859 children aged 2-3 years old, the first wave of fieldwork began in April 2005 and finished in March 2006.

1.4 For the first year of the study, interviewers sought to contact the 'main carer' of the child named in the Child Benefit records. In virtually all cases (99%), this proved to be the child's natural mother. The first interview collected data on a wide range of topics, including: pregnancy, birth and early parenting, childcare, formal and informal sources of support for parents and children, child health and development, and parental health.

1.5 This report is one of a series of three exploring findings from the first sweep of the survey on topics of particular interest to policy makers, practitioners and others. Other reports in this series examine informal care and support networks used by families with young children, and the characteristics and experiences of families living in advantaged compared with disadvantaged areas of Scotland. In addition, an overview report is available which provides key findings across all the topics included in the first sweep of the GUS study (Anderson, Bradshaw et al, 2007).

Policy background

1.6 Although the majority of the Scottish population live in urban settlements or cities, much of the geographical expanse of Scotland is sparsely populated and a substantial minority of children in Scotland are growing up in rural areas. There are a number of policy reasons for being particularly interested in the characteristics and experiences of families in rural and small-town localities. First, there are particular challenges associated with providing services for families in remote and rural areas. Providing services for small numbers of people with particular needs in dispersed populations is necessarily difficult. To do so effectively, it is important to have a good understanding of both the differing characteristics of families in urban and rural areas, and their differing patterns of service use. The overview report on the first sweep of data for GUS started to examine this in respect of childcare, noting differences in patterns of use, costs and perceptions of the degree of choice available to families in urban and rural areas. In this report, we revisit and expand on some of this analysis, as well as exploring use of ante-natal services and information and advice used during pregnancy by area.

1.7 Second, in terms of targeting policies and services to meet the needs of families across Scotland, there is a clear policy interest in understanding whether children growing up in different areas experience better or worse outcomes in terms of their health, safety and well being. The notion of the 'rural idyll' as an ideal place to bring up healthy, happy children persists in popular discourse. By tracking babies and toddlers over time GUS will allow us to explore whether any evidence for this romanticised notion of rural life actually exists, and will enable us to provide more concrete information on the specific needs of rural families to inform policies for these areas. However, even at this first sweep we can start to explore whether there are any differences in the health and well-being of babies and toddlers in urban and rural areas of Scotland, and in parental behaviours like breastfeeding and smoking which may have an impact on the current and future health of their children.

1.8 Finally, concern sparked by Scotland's low fertility on the one hand and relatively high rates of accidental teenage fertility in some areas on the other, has resulted in renewed public interest in whether there are 'geographies of fertility'. Rural areas have higher fertility rates (births per thousand women) in the ages 25-40 and lower rates of teenage fertility, although the latter is not true for small towns (see Table 1). These differences are not fully understood. While the first sweep of interviews for GUS did not address reasons for differences in fertility directly, it does allow us to begin to explore whether rural and small town areas are experienced in any measurable sense as being more 'child friendly' - that is, the extent to which the social structure and local services are focused around the lives and needs of families with young children. For example, we can compare the informal support networks available to young families in urban and rural areas, including the role of grandparents, the ease with which parents feel able to arrange help with childcare at short-notice, and the extent to which babies and toddlers growing up in different areas have contact with other children (including through mother and toddler groups). Such questions will also cast light on whether children and parents in rural areas are any more or less likely to be socially isolated than their urban counterparts.

Table 1 Number of Live Births per 1000 women 2001 by area urban-rural classification (source: Registrar General)

Structure of the report

1.9 In the remainder of this introductory section, we describe the definition of urban, rural and remote areas used in this report and note some key issues affecting our analysis. The main body of the report begins by comparing the characteristics of families with babies and toddlers across the urban-rural classification. We then examine measures of the health and well-being of babies and toddlers, including parental behaviours like smoking and breastfeeding which may impact on child health. We explore whether rural or urban children are experiencing more or less 'child friendly' environments by looking at the social worlds of babies, toddlers and parents. The paper ends by looking at service use, focusing particularly on childcare services.

Defining urban and rural areas

1.10 The Scottish Government uses an urban-rural classification which reflects the distinctive geography of Scotland in terms of rural and remote settlements. Under this classification, settlements of 3,000 or less people are defined as 'rural' while those over 10,000 are classified as 'urban', with settlements between 3,000 and 10,000 defined as 'small towns'. Small town and rural settlements are classified as 'remote' if they are more than 30 minutes drive time from settlements of 10,000 or more people.

1.11 At the time of the 2001 Census, 22% of children aged 15 or under lived in rural or remote settlements and a third lived in rural or small-town settlements (Table 2). ¹ The proportions of babies and toddlers in the GUS sample who live in rural and remote areas are very close to these Census figures for all children (Table 2 again).

Table 2 Relative proportions of Scottish children across urban-rural areas: Growing Up in Scotland ( GUS) sample and census data

^{1 Source: General Register Office for Scotland (2003) (based on the 2001 Census).}

Key issues in analysis of urban-rural differences

1.12 The sample for the GUS survey sample reflects the geographic dispersal of babies and toddlers across Scotland. At over 5,000 babies and just under 3,000 toddlers, it is sufficiently large that we will be able to pick up many significant differences (where they exist) between rural and remote areas. In this report, any differences between urban and rural areas reported in the text are statistically significant unless otherwise stated. However, even with a sample of 8,000 we are limited in the extent to which we can perform more complex analysis of sub-groups. For example, it is not possible to present tables comparing the experiences of lone parents in urban and rural areas due to the small numbers of lone parents in some categories (notably remote rural and small remote towns).

1.13 Another key issue is whether or not differences in the experiences of children and families in urban and rural areas actually reflect 'area-level' characteristics (such as quality of life, service availability, etc.), or whether in fact they are explained by differences in the types of families living in those areas. In the next section of the report, we note that there are in fact significant differences in the circumstances of urban and rural babies and toddlers in terms of the family type, parental education, parental employment and other factors.

1.14 In order to establish whether other differences between urban and rural areas are simply a reflection of these kinds of socio-demographic variations, we use a statistical analysis technique called logistic regression. Logistic regression is used to summarise the relationship between a 'dependent' variable (for example, whether a child was breastfed) and one or more 'independent' explanatory variables (for example, age of mother when the child was born, mother's education, area deprivation, urbanity/rurality, etc.). It is particularly useful when explanatory variables may be related to each other, since it takes the relationships between these into account in determining which are statistically significant. After controlling for these relationships, regression analysis tells us which variables are significantly and independently related to the variable we are interested in.

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