Sense of Community and Migration Intentions among Rural Young Professionals

This mixed-methods study examines rural young professionals' migratory intentions in relation to sense of community. The most significant difference we found in migratory intentions was between two groups, which we call stayers and seekers. Both groups highly valued sense of community but they reported dramatically different experiences related to the dimensions of membership and emotional connection to the particular focal community of this study. We find that, in addition to commonly cited factors of age, importance of family, traditional cultural tastes, and achieved sense of community, the experience of disconnection between desired and experienced sense of community represents a distinct influence on respondents' intentions to leave within the next 5 years. The qualitative data suggest that the practices of granting greater access to local stocks of knowledge, offering direct invitations to participate in community life, and providing greater responsibilities in the service of the community cultivate emotional connection and sense of membership, and therefore may be critical to better retaining those people who feel the greatest sense of disconnection. This study examines the dynamics underlying these results and outlines practical implications for other communities hoping to combat local manifestations of brain drain.     

Swept Out: Measuring Rurality and Migration Intentions on the Upper Great Plains

Rural America has long been conceptualized as a place of out‐migration, a process that is the subject of many popular sociological works and remains a dominating narrative that describes rural life in the United States today. Population trends demonstrate this migration pattern for nearly the past century; however, emerging data paint a complex picture of migration behavior and intentions in rural areas. In this article, we utilize several measures of rurality to analyze the results of a 2012 mail survey (n = 2487) that describe the migration intentions of both rural and urban South Dakotans. Our findings show that urban residents are more likely to have intentions to migrate than rural residents, and that drivers of migration intentions appear similar in both urban and rural contexts. The survey also sheds light on the influence of community attachment, community satisfaction, quality of life, and other community strengths and weaknesses that rural and urban residents perceive in their communities. Supporting recent research on rural migration intentions, these results do not suggest high rates of out‐migration in rural areas. We discuss rural America's recent identity as a place of out‐migration, share our survey results, and discuss implications for future rural migration research.     

Review Essay:Rural Sociology,Migration, and Community Change

Research in Rural Sociology and Development: Focus on Migration, edited by Harry K. Schwarzweller and Brendan P. Mullan. Population Change in the Rural West: 1975–1990, edited by John M. Wardwell and James H. Copp. Lanham, MD Community of Strangers: Change, Turnover, Turbulence and the Transformation of a Midwestern Country Town, by Joseph A. Amato and John Radzilowski.     

Home Production,House Values,and the Great Recession

Traditional labor supply models grounded in the trade-off between labor and leisure are incomplete to the extent that they neglect time spent in home production: productive labor that is not exchanged in a market setting. Models that do incorporate home production typically predict a negative relationship with the wage rate, a relationship emphasized by most analyses of time devoted to home production during recessions. However, empirical studies of the behavior of home production over the business cycle find that home production is relatively acyclical. The prominence of the fall in house values during the Great Recession suggests an alternative driver of hours dedicated to home production: non-labor endowments and assets, specifically housing equity. This paper explores the role that changing house values play in determining time dedicated to home production using the American Time Use Survey. It concludes that on the margin, time allocation responds to changes in house values in the anticipated way only under certain conditions. Specifically, when non-owners are excluded from the analysis the anticipated results do not hold. Some suggestions to explain this result are provided, as well as a discussion of future clarifying research.     

The effects of the Great Recession on American families

The Great Recession was marked by historic rates of unemployment and foreclosure and caused substantial household economic hardship and widespread economic uncertainty. I review recent social scientific research on the effects of the Great Recession on American families. I first generate a set of expectations for how the Great Recession would have affected (a) marriage and cohabitation, (b) fertility, and (c) relationship quality and divorce based on existing sociological and demographic theory and research. I then discuss the key methods that scholars have used to gauge the effects of the Great Recession in these outcome areas. My review of research to date indicates that the recession had modest effects on marriage and cohabitation, but significant negative effects on fertility. Notably, these fertility effects are evident among unmarried and low socio‐economic‐status (SES) women whom prior research has suggested decouple fertility from economic concerns. Finally, there is modest evidence that the Great Recession reduced relationship quality, but it appears that the costs of divorce restrained any increase in dissolution.     

Private Financial Transfers,Family Income,and the Great Recession

Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,701; 1998–2010), the authors studied whether the unemployment rate was associated with private financial transfers (PFTs) among urban families with young children and whether family income moderated these associations. They found that an increase in the unemployment rate was associated with greater PFT receipt and that family income moderated the association. Poor and near‐poor mothers experienced increases in PFT receipt when unemployment rates were high, whereas mothers with incomes between 2 and 3 times the poverty threshold experienced decreases. Simulations estimating the impact of the Great Recession suggest that moving from 5% to 10% unemployment is associated with a 9‐percentage‐point increase in the predicted probability of receiving a PFT for the sample as a whole, with greater increases in predicted probabilities among poor and near‐poor mothers.     

The Great Recession,Fertility, and Uncertainty: Evidence From the United States

The Great Recession produced the highest rates of unemployment and foreclosure in the United States since the Great Depression. In this article the author examines the consequences of these poor economic conditions for fertility in the United States by estimating the effect of area‐level economic conditions on state fertility in the years leading up to and including the Great Recession. The economic impacts of the Great Recession, captured by state‐level economic conditions, had a strong negative effect on fertility in models with state and year fixed effects. These reductions in fertility were likely caused both by increased economic hardship and increased economic uncertainty.     

The Increase in Payday Loans and Damaged Credit after the Great Recession

The proportion of US households that used a high-cost credit product, payday loans, almost doubled between 2007 and 2013. In this study, we estimated the effect of credit constraints on the likelihood of using payday loans. Based on a logistic regression of data from the 2007–2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), we found that households with credit constraints were more likely to use payday loans than were those that did not experience such constraints, and that the effect was greater after the Great Recession. Over the survey years, having an emergency expense was the most important reason given for using a payday loan, but the rate at which other reasons were given varied over time. Paying bills/loans and having no other credit options were both reasons given more frequently following the Great Recession than in 2007.     

The Great Recession and risk for child abuse and neglect

This paper examines the association between the Great Recession and four measures of the risk for maternal child abuse and neglect: (1) maternal physical aggression; (2) maternal psychological aggression; (3) physical neglect by mothers; and (4) supervisory/exposure neglect by mothers. It draws on rich longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth cohort study of families in 20 U.S. cities (N = 3177; 50% African American, 25% Hispanic; 22% non-Hispanic white; 3% other). The study collected information for the 9-year follow-up survey before, during, and after the Great Recession (2007–2010). Interview dates were linked to two macroeconomic measures of the Great Recession: the national Consumer Sentiment Index and the local unemployment rate. Also included are a wide range of socio-demographic controls, as well as city fixed effects and controls for prior parenting. Results indicate that the Great Recession was associated with increased risk of child abuse but decreased risk of child neglect. Households with social fathers present may have been particularly adversely affected. Results also indicate that economic uncertainty during the Great Recession, as measured by the Consumer Sentiment Index and the unemployment rate, had direct effects on the risk of abuse or neglect, which were not mediated by individual-level measures of economic hardship or poor mental health.     

The Great Recession and the Allure of New Immigrant Destinations in the United States

In the 1990s, the immigrant population in the United States dispersed to non‐traditional settlement locations (what have become known as “new immigrant destinations”). This paper examines whether the allure of new destinations persisted in the 2000s with a particular focus on the internal migration of the foreign‐born during the recent deep recessionary period and its aftermath. Three specific questions motivate the analysis. First, are immigrants, much like the U.S.‐born population, becoming less migratory within the country over time? Second, is immigrant dispersal from traditional gateways via internal migration continuing despite considerable economic contraction in many new destination metropolitan areas? Third, is immigration from aboard a substitute for what appears to be declining immigrant internal migration to new destinations? The findings reveal a close correlation between the declining internal migration propensity of the U.S.‐born and immigrants in the last two decades. We also observe parallels between the geographies of migration of native‐ and foreign‐born populations with both groups moving to similar metropolitan areas in the 1990s. This redistributive association, however, weakened in the subsequent decade as new destination metropolitan areas lost their appeal for both groups, especially immigrants. There is no evidence to suggest that immigration from abroad is substituting for the decline in immigrant redistribution through internal migration to new destinations. Across destination types, the relationship between immigration from abroad and the internal migration of the foreign‐born remained the same during and after the Great Recession as in the period immediately before it.     

Community Development's Role in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Projects for African Americans

The study investigates the use of community development strategies to address the problem of high morbidity and mortality rates among African Americans in eight Michigan communities. The findings indicate a shift from a traditional medical paradigm, one-to-one doctor–patient approach, to a social behavioral paradigm that incorporates community development approaches, such as technical assistance and self help approaches. This fosters lifestyle changes that are needed to impact the cardiovascular disease-related morbidity and mortality statistics. In addition, the research links the findings of the use of community development approaches to community capacity building. This study concludes that applying community development approaches can serve as the catalyst to planned change as it relates to health empowerment, which in turn will help disenfranchised groups of people to become more empowered in making other significant changes in their communities.     

Economic Strain and Children's Behavior in the Aftermath of the Great Recession

Families across the income spectrum experienced subjective feelings of economic strain during the Great Recession. Existing evidence suggests that much of that economic strain did not arise from individual‐specific economic shocks, such as unemployment or income loss, as much as it did from worry and uncertainty about the future. The authors tested a model in which a measure of subjective perceptions of economic strain was the key predictor of children's behavior problems and objective indicators of economic experiences were treated as control variables. To do so, they used new data from a population‐based sample of children ages 4–17 (N = 303) living in southeast Michigan during the period 2009–2012. They found that economic strain exhibited a qualitatively large independent association with internalizing behavior problems for White—but not Black—children. This association was statistically significant over and above objective indicators of economic experiences and the family psychosocial context.     

The Imperative of Place: Homicide and the New Latino Migration

Prior research finds that Latino immigration reduced violence. We argue that this is because they settled in traditional immigrant areas. But recent migrants settled in new destinations where the immigration–violence link is more complex. Contrary to previous findings, we observe that (1) Latino homicide victimization is higher in new destinations; (2) Latino immigration increases victimization rates, but only in new destinations and only for Latinos entering after 1990, when they fanned out to new destinations; and (3) Latino deprivation increases victimization only in new destinations because, we speculate, these new areas lack the protective social control umbrella of traditional destinations. Thus, the “Latino paradox” may be less useful than time‐honored sociological frameworks for understanding the link between Latino immigration and violence.     

The Role of Men's Childbearing Intentions in Father Involvement

An expanding body of research has investigated factors that influence fathers' involvement with their children. Generally overlooked has been the role of pregnancy intentions on men's fathering behaviors. In this study, the authors used nationally representative data from men interviewed in the 2002 and 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth to examine relationships between fathers' pregnancy intentions and multiple aspects of their parental involvement. Using propensity score methods to control for confounding, they found that men were less likely to live with a young child from a mistimed than intended pregnancy and that among nonresident fathers, mistimed pregnancies were associated with lower levels of visitation and consequently reduced participation in caregiving and play. Among both resident and nonresident fathers, mistimed pregnancies were also associated with lower self‐appraisals of fathering quality when compared with intended pregnancies; for nonresident fathers, however, this association was moderated by other involvement.     

Government Subsidies and Household Debt Burden After the Great Recession

During the recent Great Recession, US households, especially those with low incomes, faced severe financial distress. Households experiencing economic hardship may turn to receiving government assistance to alleviate the hardship or distress. Receiving government assistance may improve a household’s financial situation as it could be decreasing its reliance on debt or even improving a household’s ability to repay their current debt. We investigated how households’ financial debt obligations were affected by receiving government assistance, as has not been previously analyzed. Given the focus of this research, we included households under 185 % of poverty threshold released by the 2012 US Census Bureau. Results from the 2010 and 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances indicate that government assistance was positively related to the odds of meeting debt-to-income ratio guidelines, implying that government assistance plays an important role in financial security of low-income households. This study provides important insights for researchers and policymakers in the areas of poverty and household finance.     

The Great Recession of 2007: An Agenda for Social Justice

The Great Recession, the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, officially began in December 2007 with an 8 trillion dollar housing bubble and lasted until June 2009, resulting in loss in consumer spending and collapse in the nation’s business investment. For American workers, the Great Recession had far-reaching implications: unemployment, underemployment, pay cuts, and cutbacks in household spending. Although social work has a historical commitment to address the vulnerabilities of people and communities, we argue that the profession neglected to understand fully the factors associated with the Great Recession and to mount an agenda for justice in response to its worker-related impact.     

Economic Conditions of Young Adults Before and After the Great Recession

Transition to adulthood has undoubtedly changed in the last few decades. For youth today, an important marker of adulthood is self-actualization in their professional career, and, consequently, also the achievement of stable financial conditions. Economic conditions of youth are greatly subject to fluctuations in the economy, and the subsequent governmental response. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, this work investigates the trends in income from work of young adults before and after the Great Recession of 2008 in five countries—US, UK, Norway, Germany, and Spain. The findings showed deterioration in economic conditions of young men, but with differences across countries. Young women suffered less from the crisis, and in some countries, their economic situation improved. The general negative trend was especially pronounced for those with high education, which is primarily because they stayed in education longer.     

Return Migration Intentions in the Integration–Transnationalism Matrix

This article asks how return migration intentions are shaped by ties to the country of residence on the one hand, and ties to the country of origin on the other. We discuss these two sets of ties in terms of immigrant integration and transnationalism, respectively. A central tenet of the study is that, at the individual level, integration and transnationalism are neither related in a predictable way nor independent of each other. In our analysis we take methodological steps that reflect this argument, and introduce an integration–transnationalism matrix. In the empirical analysis we use quantitative survey data (N = 3,053) on ten large immigrant groups in Norway, collected by Statistics Norway in 2005–06. We find that it is the relative strength of integration and transnationalism that is decisive for return migration intentions.