Mental health is a prevalent health concern, particularly in rural North Carolina. Geographic barriers to mental health providers and mental health stigma prevent many people from seeking mental health treatment in rural areas. Best practices to address the disparity in mental health outcomes in rural NC would be expanding telemental healthcare infrastructure and investing in mental health stigma education efforts.

There remains great scholarly debate on how to best apply an intersectional framework to survey questions as intersectionality in empirical modes of data collection often complicates data analysis. The multiple social identities and structures that are core to intersectionality are often at odds with principles of scientific inquiry that tend to encourage investigation of one variable, or one facet of identity, at a time. This means that surveys are often designed to neatly categorize respondents’ identities for the purposes of simple and straightforward data analysis and interpretation at the expense of truly representing respondents’ identities.