Extensive research gives voice to some rural poor | Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America |...

Riveting | Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America | Cynthia M. Duncan

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	• Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America Cynthia M. Duncan Yale University Press, 2000 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Social Insurance & Economic Insecurity

The book Worlds Apart describes what life is like for people of different social classes in three different places in the United States. Blackwell* in the Appalachia, and Dahlia* on the Mississippi are two of these places where inequality is constant. Another place where Cynthia M. Duncan studies is Grey Mountain*, New England, where the opposite happens. Citizens are involved in local government; this helps to reduce class inequalities.
Duncan gets very in depth in discovering the roots of the problems of social inequality. Her research consists of visiting everyplace for an extended period of time, with dialogue from 40 of the 350 local people she interviewed in the book.
In Blackwell, she describes the everyday contempt the rich and poor hold for one another, and how neither side has any desire to meet in the middle. People in Blackwell are also distinguished by the job they hold. If you are lucky enough to hold a job, you become a "have", if you don't you become a "have not".
As the author describes, poverty and inequality situation is so drastic in Blackwell that a local pastor is forced to start weeding out candidates for Christian charity. He says everyday people come in and ask the church to pay for their groceries, gas, and other bills. Word has spread around the impoverished community about his good charity and he finds the numbers of his congregation rapidly rising. Duncan finds that experiences like this undermine community trust and reinforce community held opinions that the poor citizens scheme and manipulate the system.
Dahlia in the Mississippi Delta has similar class separation to Blackwell and contempt for one another. The book continues through Dahlia and Grey Mountain, New England. The New England section focuses on equality and civic involvement. Something unheard of in the previous two sections of the book.
The section after Grey Mountain, Northern New England is titled "social change and social policy". This section makes suggestions for solutions on how to combat the problems seen in Blackwell and Dahlia. The main point that Duncan is trying to make is that in order for real change to happen, a complete outside source is needed. One with no local ties or biases. Her suggestion is that federal aid come from the outside, where locals are unable to take advantage of aid, and aid is based on need rather than first come first served.
I suggest that before reading Worlds Apart, the reader look in the appendix and study the various trends. This will allow the reader to paint a more realistic picture of the three circumstances that Duncan describes.

* Real names have been changed

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Extensive research gives voice to some rural poor

Dr. Cynthia Duncan, Sociologist at University of New Hampshire, spent over five years (with some assistance from graduate students) conducting in-depth, life history-producing, interviews with 350 residents of two impoverished rural communities (one in Appalachia and one in the Mississippi Delta) and a more prosperous rural New England community. Dr. Duncan does not explicitly recognize any theory in this text, but she seems to work from a grounded theory method: giving voice to the rural citizens and letting the citizens have some ownership in guiding the study. There are also shades of conflict theory, especially when Duncan points out the local rural elites, although she doesn't discuss the 'power elites' (a la C.W. Mills and W. Domhoff). In this text we meet only 40 of the 350 interviewed citizens, and I thirst to meet more citizens and know more about their lives. We meet citizens of varying: gender, age, race, SES, and occupations. The text also presents a rich historical background on each society. I found the text to be most helpful when comparing and contrasting Dahlia and Blackwell (Appalachia and the Delta). The information on Gray Mountain (New England) was informative and interesting, but I didn't find it to be an effective community to utilize to compare to the other two communities. I yearn for Duncan to find a rural southern society that is comparable to Gray Mountain. Gray Mountain seemed to be on the edge of great change, and I would like Dr. Duncan to re-visit Gray Mountain, in a future study, reporting on the change (or stability) of the community.

Dr. Duncan spent nearly a decade in a tug-of-war as this text was edited down. There are necessarily (due to publishing matters) muted voices and hopefully these voices speak through Duncan's future works. Dr. Duncan is a devoted Appalachian scholar who has invested decades of her life trying to understand (and alleviate) poverty in Appalachia and the Delta. This text can serve as a beneficial introduction to her body of work on poverty. If this text inspires you, then also seek out Dr. Duncan's work in academic journals.

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Riveting

I come from rural America, where jobs are few. Duncan presents portions of my voice and she reveals how structural limitations continue to stifle many upright citizens who want to work, but can't find work in rural America. I would have liked to have seen more content analysis of the local media in the towns that Duncan studied.

Over five years, sociologist Cynthia Duncan visited remote rural areas across the U.S. and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with the residents to unravel the ways in which poverty is perpetuated--and what can be done to alleviate the problem.

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