WESTERN BASELINE SURVEY
Measuring what shapes household well-being and community livability across the American West.
4,500+
household decision makers
13
Western states
2025
first Western survey
about the survey
What is the Western Baseline Survey?
WRDC has worked with Purdue University and the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (NCRCRD) to implement the Western Baseline Survey.
In 2025, the survey was conducted for the first time in the West — Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
More than 4,500 household decision-makers were enrolled, and respondents were asked questions on general topics crucial to household well-being and community development.
The survey covers a wide range of themes
Six interrelated topics that together describe household and community life
Household demographics
Resilient communities & economies
Moving & staying behavior
Civic engagement & community belonging
Community health & wellness
Environment
Built for comparison over time
Comparability and trend analysis are key for policymaking. For this purpose, the same baseline survey is administered by the four Regional Rural Development Centers across the United States at regular intervals.
Supporting the wRDC Mission
This initiative supports WRDC’s mission to enhance research and educational outreach capacity across the region’s land-grant institutions — directly supporting Extension programming through evidence-based insights for program development, stakeholder engagement, and grant applications.
Funding Statement: This work is supported by the Western Rural Development Center, project award no. 2024-51150-43727, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as an official determination or policy of the WRDC, the USDA, or the U.S. Government.
Explore the findings
Three ways into the data
Get Involved
Expanding the survey to Pacific Territories
We are working on expanding the survey to the Pacific Territories.
If you have an available sample of households, you can partner with WRDC to implement the survey. Contact our research team:
Dr. Nadeeka Weerasekara
Research Associate · nadeeka@uidaho.edu
Dr. Richard Acquah-Sarpong
Postdoctoral Fellow · richarda@uidaho.edu
Dr. Shengrong Hu
Postdoctoral Fellow · shu@uidaho.edu
Webinar
Results in other regions
On May 9, 2025, NCRCRD hosted the webinar Regional Pulse: Insights from the 2024 Multi-Region Household Surveys, featuring Maria I. Marshall (NCRCRD Director), Zuzana Bednarik (NCRCRD Research and Extension Specialist), and John J. Green (Director, Southern Rural Development Center). It summarizes results from the Northeast, North Central, and Southern regions.