This paper draws from a large longitudinal study into issues related to student retention beyond the compulsory years of schooling and gives voice to a commonly-overlooked set of stakeholders, namely those in the community. Although many studies report on students' and teachers' opinions of the influence of the community on student engagement and…

Although originally developed in terms of interpersonal systems, the coorientational strategy model can be modified and used for research on the communication of collectivities. The proposed changes to the coorientational framework would permit examination of constructs of greater verisimilitude to theoretical reasoning of the behavior and…

This report is a summary of discussions that took place at the Learning and Community Transition, Lakes District Rural Dialogue, held in Burns Lake, British Columbia, on March 29, 2006. This dialogue emerged further to a meeting of northern federal representatives which was organized to better coordinate federal support for northern B.C.…

Developed in Australia, the Griffith Service Access Frame (GSAF) is a model that uses the distance, size, and economic resources of a community to calculate a statistically valid score measuring a community's relative access to services. This score is then translated into Zones of Relative Access to those services. Quantifying access to services…

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…

The study reported in this paper expands the arena of agenda-setting to include the content of a small daily newspaper and what the people of that community say they read and talk about during a non-political period. The newspaper's agenda was established by content analysis of 51 issues, resulting in classification of 3415 stories in 41 content…

The study analyzed support patterns for two predominant "liberal" development strategies ("growth centers" and the consolidation of government services) among elites from communities in a largely underdeveloped rural region of Wisconsin. Analytic focus was twofold: (1) to assess overall levels of support among community elites,…

A questionnaire was sent to all 256 public school districts in the State of Oregon, requesting information on policies towards students or personnel with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The survey was designed to see if districts had either a written or unwritten policy specifically designed to deal with AIDS. Responses indicated that…

This paper presents a case study of a rural community exhibiting a dramatic turnaround in community support for a new school bond issue. Demographic change was partly responsible for the change in community attitudes, with two waves of immigration altering the long-term conservative orientation of this community. After a series of failed…

This paper presents survey results from rural areas having significant levels of employment both in agriculture and in extraction industries (coal mining). Although a review of the literature suggests that rural residents may express lower levels of environmental concern than urban residents, one study proposed that rural residents in farm-related…

To examine ratings of satisfaction with selected community services in relation to spending preferences and to ascertain policy-relevant implications of citizen evaluations in planning and delivering rural services), a study focused on perceptions of community leaders and household respondents in eight rural Alabama counties. Research literature…

The extent to which citizens are knowledgeable about and satisfied with major services in their communities is important in effective community development. Quantities as well as quality of services need to be assessed to make a meaningful evaluation of quality of life. To investigate selected institutional services in Hopkins County, Texas, in…

Land use controls are often a major point of conflict between recent migrants and long-term residents of rapidly growing communities. Such conflict was noted in a case study of a rural community undergoing rapid population growth. The revision of a comprehensive land use plan for the community provided the opportunity to evaluate citizen…

Three intermountain communities in Colorado and Utah were studied to determine the impact of rapid development on residents of rural communities, especially on their views of the world and their personal well-being, and to assess the degree to which energy boomtowns experience the social disruption suggested in the classical boomtown studies. Two…

To compare various socio-demographic indicators and attitudes on community issues of recent urban to rural migrants with those of native residents, personal interviews were conducted with an adult in 3391 households in the 5 county Meramec Area of Missouri during the fall of 1977. Of the respondents, 24% had lived in the county 7 years or less,…