Rural Definition Triangulation: Improving the Credibility and Transferability of Rural Education Research in the United States

In this article, we introduce a novel framework called Rural Definition Triangulation (RDT) to enhance the categorization of rurality in educational research. This approach leverages the credibility component from Tracy's "Eight 'Big Tent' Criteria for Excellent Qualitative Research," applying it across qualitative, multimethod, and mixed methods research paradigms. RDT serves as a guide for scholars to authenticate definitions of rurality. We present RDT as a matrix with a vertical axis that represents the continuum of site-centric to participant-centric definitions. The horizontal axis represents the continuum of positivist leaning to interpretivist leaning definitions. We detail the matrix-based structure of RDT, which encompasses four distinct definitional approaches: definition reliance, site definition checking, participation definition checking, and personal description definition. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of RDT, we also provide examples of these four approaches in already published research.