Economic Restructuring and Family Well-Being in Rural America

“This is a timely and important book on a very underresearched and misunderstood topic. As numerous others point out, ‘rural’ America is not just farms and rural areas, and its problems are not all that different in some fundamental ways from urban ones. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in better understanding how global economic changes have affected not only jobs but, crucially, the people who hold them, the places they live, the people they live with. The book will be of interest to academics and nonacademics alike. Policy makers would be particularly well advised to learn from its rich empirical analysis and thoughtful discussion.”

—William W. Falk, University of Maryland

“This volume is a benchmark on responses to economic change in the United States. The editors have done a masterful job in showcasing a breadth of scholarship, reflected collectively in the contributing authors’ interdisciplinary approaches, attention to an array of family, demographic, and economic outcomes, and concern with theoretical as well as policy-related issues. The chapters combine rigorous analysis and detailed implications for public policy in a lucid manner that will be accessible to a variety of audiences. In confronting and comparing rural responses with those documented in urban settings, the chapters provide an innovative corrective to conventional work in sociology, family studies, demography, economics, and policy studies.”

—Linda Lobao, The Ohio State University

“While the troubles facing the banking and housing sectors have served as the focal points of our nation’s economic woes, it’s around the kitchen tables of many rural American families where the pain and strain have been profoundly felt. Regrettably, efforts to examine the multifaceted consequences of economic restructuring on family well-being have been virtually absent—until now. Assembling a veritable ‘who’s who’ among social and behavioral scientists, Smith and Tickamyer have guided the development of an impressive research volume that offers important insights into the array of family-related challenges playing in rural America today as a product of national and global economic forces. The value-added aspect of this volume is the attention that it devotes to policy—to the mix of investments and refinements that policy makers must pursue in order to promote the stability and the long-term vitality of families in rural America.”

—Lionel J. “Bo” Beaulieu, Southern Rural Development Center, Mississippi State University