A random telephone survey of 25 residents in Iowa Falls, a small town in rural north-central Iowa, examined opinions and attitudes about the health of their community. The community has a population of 5,424, including 1,276 students in Grades K-12; is the largest city in the county; and is the site of a community college. Sixty percent of…

Despite their important role in the community, there have been a number of economic cycles and population shifts which have resulted in rural communities losing their weekly newspapers. An exploratory case study examined a small Iowa community of 450 persons which launched a volunteer newspaper nearly 10 years ago. The experiences of this…

During the second year of a 3-year study involving 112 Iowa farm families, mothers of children aged 4 to 10 years old expressed expectations of independence, responsibility, and hard work from their children during home interviews. The importance of the parent-child relationship together with the lack of sufficient child-rearing research on rural…

Eleven Iowa towns in 11 counties and 11 Area Education Agencies (AEAs), having both elementary and high schools in 1960, were chosen via a rural-urban continuum to ascertain evidence of creativity in providing community services after losing the high school between 1960 and 1980. The study compared: community services in 1955-56 and 1980-81 (a…

This document considers whether postsecondary education can change the way it operates. The introduction identifies six challenges of the 1990s, including heterogeneous student populations; quality of working life competence, basic competence, employability competence, learning-to-learn competence, common core competencies, and the arts and…