Community poverty, analyzed as the sum of several types of social and territorial deprivation, is the geographical expression of various processes and phenomena, commonly the object of sociological and economic studies. In this paper we performed a statistical compaction of a series of synthetic indicators, generating an indicator called the index of community development. The statistical validation of these results is accompanied by a spatial validation, which identifies the legitimate social structures in rural areas, emphasizing that obtaining valid results in the implementation of territorial development strategies depends more on the consistency of the scientific methods used to interpret statistical analysis.