**Table 1.** Categories of the survey.

We used different types of questions: closed, multiple-choice questions to make it easy and fast to answer the questions for the respondents. Rating scale questions were used to get a quick and easy to answer overview on e.g., duration, willingness to spend etc. Considering the expected low response rate, we decided to ask mostly open-ended questions to get answers to unusual options or singular types.

An online survey was executed between end of February and April 2020, addressed to respondents who were directly related to rural coworking spaces. The operators of 80 rural coworking spaces were contacted via email and asked to distribute the link to the survey to their user and tenants. The first email contact was followed up by phone calls and follow-up emails. From that group, initially 13 operators confirmed to distribute the survey among their users and tenants.

#### **4. Results**

#### *4.1. Responses*

The survey was answered by 36 persons, of which four answers were unreliable and therefore excluded. Unfortunately, this number of responses is rather low. We only received answers from tenants or users of 12 coworking spaces. It is not clear why the number of responses was that low as well. Possibly, the spreading of the corona virus and the officially issued lockdown from the middle of March 2020 [137] restrained operators and tenants from distributing and answering the questionnaire. Nevertheless, we consider the responses, which we did obtain still relevant and appropriate, as they still provide a general picture and some first clues regarding the research question. The subsequent sections provide the results. The respondents came from coworking spaces spread over Germany, from the northeast to southwest and southeast. The respondents were located in remote and shrinking cities, which recently dropped below the limit of major city and small villages of a few hundred inhabitants.

We do not know to how many tenants the coworking space operators forwarded our survey, hence we cannot provide a typical response rate.
