Conducting rural criminological research exposes researchers to concerns such as absence or inadequate official data about crime and superficial rural-urban comparisons, rural isolation and distance from the researchers' office to the study site, and lack of services or access to justice. This distinct cultural context means that studying rural crime requires creatively adapting existing research methods. Conducting research about or in rural settings requires unique researcher preparation, as everything from defining the space at the conception of a project to collecting and analyzing data differs from urban research.

This book explores the various issues, challenges, and solutions for rural researchers in criminology. Integrating state of the art methodological approaches with practical illustrations, this book serves as an internationally comprehensive compendium of methods for students, scholars, and practitioners. While contributing to the growing field of rural criminology, it will also be of interest to those engaged with the related areas of rural health care, rural social work, and rural poverty.

Drawing primarily on research with law enforcement officers in rural East Texas, this research note explores the practical challenges of conducting qualitative research with rural police and provides tips for successfully overcoming the barriers that arise. Conducting qualitative research in a rural setting, especially with rural law enforcement agencies and officers, presents unique challenges. As with all rural investigations, defining 'rural' and identifying a target space to study is the first substantial hurdle. Once a rural community has been identified, the researcher will face issues related to the geographic distance or isolation of their chosen community that can affect their physical access to the research site and data. Traveling to and navigating rural spaces requires extensive preparation that may be easily overlooked if the researcher is accustomed to collecting data in and from urban cities and agencies. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, challenges involving sociocultural access accompany rural research projects. Regarding law enforcement specifically, the intersection of the rural community's culture, dense social networks, and an often-distinct occupational police subculture can either be advantageous, or present obstacles, to successful completion of research. Furthermore, the rural researcher must consider their physical and emotional safety when interviewing, engaging, or participating with first responders. Backup may be delayed due to the geographic expansiveness of an agency's jurisdiction and the fact that few officers are patrolling at a given time, and treatment in the event of a tragic encounter may be limited due to the lack – sometimes simultaneously in quantity and quality – of healthcare facilities and providers.

The most recent good news is that the South African Government has certified the International Journal of Rural Criminology and all the other journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This means that scholars will earn "publishing points" if published in journals like IJRC, encouraging them to submit to and refer to "free quality content" in open access journals. So, to quote the now famous and often cited song title by the Nobel Prize Winner in Literature and pop/folk song writer, Bob Dylan, "the times they are a-changin".

IJRC too is "a-changin", perhaps "adjustin" is the better word, in two ways. First, on the About page are now warning statements about plagiarism and AI-generated content. Both are not acceptable. We now use Turnitin on all submissions, and the AI checker as well. Second, this is the third issue in volume 8, and it is expected there will be a fourth issue published late in 2024. That will allow us to publish IJRC with each volume corresponding to the calendar year, beginning in 2025.

Using mixed methods, we examine how a cohort of twelve sites operationalized and adapted the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Innovations in Community-Based Crime Reduction (CBCR) grant program. CBCR is built around data, place-based strategies, neighborhood revitalization, and community partnerships. Community-based interventions are typically quite complex, embedding multiple mechanisms by which the intervention may succeed or fail. We examine fidelity to the program and its relationship to implementation success, as well as the achievements and challenges reported by the sites.

Informal law enforcement approaches to crime problems are largely hidden from the public domain. Non-urban communities are often absent from the literature on police decision-making, but many characteristics of 'the rural' – such as lack of supervision, diminished access to resources, and more – expand police discretion and increase the use of informal policing methods. While most research on police discretion focuses on the decision to arrest, the current study utilizes semi-structured focused interviews with law enforcement officers in rural Texas to address non-arrest decision-making and the informal policing of youth. Specific informal responses, as well as factors that influence officer decision-making, are discussed. The findings suggest that the structural, cultural, and situational context of a rural setting uniquely affects police decision-making, highlighting the significance of geographic and sociocultural environment in use of discretion. The qualitative approach and analysis provide extensive detail regarding place-based effects on the police decision-making process, including officer motivations and how officers attribute meaning and contextually filter information in an encounter with youth. By illuminating the gray area of policing, these findings have implications for rural law enforcement training and practices and provide future direction for broader agency policy research.

Police officers and agencies in the twenty-first century garner significant attention from politicians, researchers, journalists, and the general public alike. Much policing research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of police while highlighting opportunities for reform. Largely missing from the mainstream discussion and literature, however, is attention to these issues in rural communities. Significant portions of the world’s population reside in rural communities and rely on rural police agencies for access to formal justice system processing. The context of a rural setting uniquely affects the way in which police operate, engage community members, and more.

Evidence-based program implementation in criminal justice and community settings is complex and rarely encounters an ideal set of conditions. Implementation failure may be more common than success, and the field has only started to seriously consider how to improve dissemination and implementation. Research-practitioner partnerships are a potential mechanism for achieving implementation success. Using an implementation science framework, we examine the impact of researcher involvement and activity on implementation outcomes in a sample of 49 community-based multi-agency initiatives to improve public safety. Our findings suggest that projects focused more heavily on data and analysis from the outset achieved better implementation outcomes across multiple domains, including fidelity, penetration and dosage, complexity, execution, and sustainability. Similar improvements in outcomes were not associated with more robust data collection, access, or analytic capacity.

'Rural', most crudely, is defined as 'non-urban', but this dichotomous delineation is grossly inadequate because it neglects the consideration of the nuances of geography, demography, attitudes, culture and issues of access both tangible and amorphous. These are vitally important considerations: there exists significant cultural and spatial separation between urban and rural because what is taken for granted in the city is not accessible or available outside of it.

There exists, most certainly, definitional difficulties about rural that will never go away. Should we just consider physical and demographic measures, such as population size and density, accessibility and remoteness? Such imprecision is typified by the existing definitions even within the same jurisdictions by different organizations and agencies of the same governmental units. Adopting a 'one size fits all' approach is unwise, though, as a universal measure will not account for the non-homogenous nature of geographic location, both within and across jurisdictions.

For instance, a coastal location in Australia dominated with former city dwellers cannot be easily compared to a rapidly populated boom town in Canada reliant on imported labour, to a primarily agricultural community in Ireland with multiple generations of the same families present, to the Yanomamo and Kayapo and other tribes in the rain forest regions of South America, nor to a remote settlement in the Siberian region of Russia or in the state of Alaska in the United States. Indeed, different places have different cultural origins - as scholars such as Hayden, Weisheit et al, Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy, Ceccato, Harkness (see suggested readings) and many other scholars already have observed. Hence, the rural can also be considered a state of mind as much as a particular place found on a map. There is just no way to define all the diversity of rural localities with a single word, sentence, paragraph and, perhaps, even in a single book.