A new study from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) shows that limited access to digital resources may play a role in rural cancer survivors being under-represented in cancer research.
As Little Rock Public Radio and its sister station KUAF report, Pearl McElfish, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Institute for Community Health Innovation at UAMS. “It is intuitive that older people may want mail in options. I think the challenge is, in research we’re often moving to digital platforms and then we look at the results, and we say, ‘well, most people are younger, higher educated, in an urban area, and so we’re missing rural, older, and sometimes less educated people.”
Researchers documented that very same preference for mail or phone calls from the more rural and urban participants in that study entitled, Participation in Cancer Survivorship Survey Research: Difference by Rurality and Age, [published in Cambridge’s Journal of Clinical and Translational Science].
One common misconception, according to McElfish, is to assume that potential participants who may be hard to reach don’t want to take part in research. She calls that conclusion false, and that the true burden should be on the researcher to meet them where they are. As McElfish continued, “So part of meeting people where they are is not just presuming that everyone is comfortable with digital technology and understanding some things like snail mail actually work better for some people.”
Further compounding the issue in Arkansas is the fact it’s one of the most rural states in the country, with nearly 45% of the state’s population living in rural areas, according to the 2025 Rural Profile of Arkansas by the state’s Cooperative Extension Service. Research has already discovered that cancer patients living in rural areas have poorer outcomes compared with their urban counterparts, often attributed to limited access to medical, technological, and financial resources, to cancer screenings, among the many factors involved.
To get a sense of the gulf between the urban versus rural health care systems, the graphic above from the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM), a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank, which looked collectively at far more than just rural cancer rates, but rural health overall.
