2.2.1. Demographics

Participants were asked to provide their gender (male, female), age, education level (less than high school, some college/associates degree, college, more than college), race (black or African American, white, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander), ethnicity (Hispanic), marital status (married, widowed, divorced, separated, never married, unmarried couple), household income (less than 20,000, 20,000–49,999, 50,000–79,999, 80,000 or more), and zip code. In order to minimize the number of variables, educational level was used as a surrogate to income as they were highly correlated. To define rurality, each participant's zip code was compared to the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC) [30]—a code of four or higher was operationally defined as rural [31,32].
