Analysis of Iowa Youth and Families Project data found three distinct routes to 4-year college attendance: the traditional path of youth with professional/managerial parents; farm youth's use of parents' community ties; and the path of resourceful lower-status rural youth, whose attainment grew from early educational ambition and varied community…

Analysis of data from the National Education Longitudinal Study supported the thesis that rural adolescents' disadvantages with regard to certain family and school resources and resulting low investments in education explain rural deficits in both educational attainment and standardized achievement. (Contains 67 references.) (Author/SV)

A study trained 14 high school students to interview 220 rural West Virginia students in grades 7-10 about their social service needs and their delivery preferences. Results indicate that large numbers of rural students were perceived by their peers as having major social and emotional problems yet little knowledge of human service professionals.…

Youth First conducted focus groups and participatory "youth tribunals" across New Zealand, examining experiences of growing up rural. Common themes included "not being listened to," exclusion from citizen participation, and anxiety about the future. Remarkable differences in experience and views were often found in the same…

Gifted females have less frequently sought high-prestige and high-income careers due to a number of barriers. Some barriers are related to society's expectations of women, and others are related to the workplace itself. The most limiting and pervasive barrier is "sex role socialization's impact on the child's developing self-belief system"…

This paper examines the incentive structures in rural communities that encourage or discourage the accumulation of human capital. This is done by identifying the factors that influence educational performance in four school districts in rural Appalachian Virginia and Kentucky. A review of human capital theory, models, and functions generated six…

This report describes an inquiry into the work attitudes and career decision making skills of 754 sophomores in seven rural and one urban high school in Maine. The study is the first part of a planned 7-year longitudinal study that will interview these students again when they are seniors and then again 5 years later. The eight papers in the…

Utilizing data collected from high school sophomores in 1972 and 1973, the study investigated the religious behavior and orientations of rural Black, White, and Mexican American youth in reference to religious affiliation, church participation, religious self-image (perceptions by peers), religious identification as an impediment to social…

The study contributed to further understanding of the educational and occupational aspirations of Louisiana rural seniors during 1968 and 1972 and of rural seniors from throughout the United States and the South in 1972. Of the variables used, i.e., time, location, sex, and race, two variables were significant on levels of aspiration time and…

Data from the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of the high school class of 1972 (statistics on a national sample of young adults as they moved out of high school into early adulthood) were used to test rural young adults' sex role orientation and the rural-urban differential in sex role orientation. NLS data were collected for the base year…

Contrary to recent national trends, enrollments at colleges of agriculture have increased 181% between 1963 and 1976, with an ever increasing proportion of agricultural students coming from urban backgrounds. During the spring of 1977, mail questionnaire data were collected from 3,175 undergraduate "ag" majors (93.8% White and 6.2%…

Phase two of the report on the Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC) is aimed at finding whether systematic relationships exist between identifiable deficiencies in the rural community and the occupational and social adjustment of rural youth. NYC, designed for rural and urban communities to keep youth in schools, was studied in phase one through a…

Class awareness among rural children was investigated in three dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, and evaluative. Data were obtained from 378 white students in grades K-8 in 9 rural elementary schools in the Upper Cumberland region of middle Tennessee. Children's social class background (SES) was determined by their father's occupational strata…

Background research suggested the need for significant concept changes in antipoverty programs such as Neighborhood Youth Corps in meeting the needs of rural youth. A model program designed to maximize social and occupational adjustment of rural youth had been carried out for one year by each of three experimental projects located in northern…

To test a facilitative-constraint model, data about marijuana use was collected from 4,859 high school students in 2 rural southern Georgia counties. The model was useful for predicting frequency of use and classifying students as users, experimenters, and nonusers. Access to drugs and identification with drug-oriented groups were strong…