This study examined the levels of stock of social infrastructure and the spatial
pattern of development in rural areas of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Empirical and
theoretical approaches were employed in the investigation and data on 21 social
indicator variables/surrogates were collected from 50 villages in the State using
questionnaire and field observation as research tools. An index of social infrastructure
stock was evolved and hierarchical cluster analysis statistics was applied on the stock
of social infrastructure in order to group the communities on the basis of social
infrastructure profiles. The single linkage cluster analysis was employed to illustrate
the linear combination of the communities in rural areas that were found to fall into
low (Group 1), fair (Group 2), moderate (Group 3) and high (Group 4) performance
patterns of social infrastructure stock. The result shows that the study area is
characterised by many vulnerable communities that are very weak in stock of social
infrastructure. The multiple linear discriminant Analysis (MLDA) technique was used
to assess the optimality of earlier groupings of settlements in the study area. The result
showed that MLDA correctly classified 97.6 per cent of the settlements. The technique
correctly classified most of the Group one settlements with a few misclassifications
but correctly classified all the remaining groups of settlements without any
misclassification. In addition, health infrastructure was identified as the single most
important independent variable that discriminated the four groups of settlements
obtained earlier, thus highlighting its contribution to improving the social
infrastructure in the study area.