Recipient Organization
UNIV OF WISCONSIN
21 N PARK ST STE 6401
MADISON,WI 53715-1218
Performing Department
Community and Environmental Sociology
Non Technical Summary
Most research attempting to understand youth and rural brain drain/gain analyzes data at the county level. But county level data analysis does not offer enough of a fine-grained analysis to control for factors in local communities, such as the presence of penal institutions and higher education institutions, both of which can skew the statistics and about which local government can do little. For example, it is possible for one corner of the county to have a high youth gain college town and another corner to have a youth-losing mill town. In addition, county government can often do little to impact quality life at the municipal level, and most people do not experience life at the county level but at the local municipal level. Therefore, we assert that research focus should not be at the county level. Rather, it should be at the municipal level. And at this level we know very little. To address this need, we ask: How do rural towns and villages gain or lose young people and the talent they may represent?We will use population statistics at the municipal level, identifying local communities that stand out as gaining or retaining young people without the presence of an obvious factor such as a college or university. We will then collect data on and analyze the combination of factors that help those communities retain or gain young people.Our study purpose is to identify factors enhancing youth brain gain that municipalities can actually do something about. Municipalities can't, for example, move themselves closer to a city. It is almost impossible that they can attract a new college. But there are likely other strategies, currently unidentified, that they can do. Our research aims to identify these strategies.
Animal Health Component
10%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
40%
Applied
10%
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
Our first goal is to identify the combination of factors that come together in rural communities that successfully gain and retain young people. Our second goal is to create an evidence-based process whereby other municipalities that want to gain/retain young people can use our findings to study their own communities and contextual conditions, deepen their understanding of their local assets and barriers, and plan youth recruitment and retention strategies accordingly.Objectives:1. use demographic methods to identify six to twelve rural Wisconsin municipalities that are doing better than average at gaining and/or retaining young adults.2. use a comparative case study approach to identify what factors or causal sequences might be common across municipalities, or what factors might be dependent on specific contextual conditions, for gaining and retaining young adults.3. produce reports and organize events so that leaders and residents of those municipalities may better understand their own communities and leaders of other municipalities might learn from those communities.
Project Methods
In the first stage, the Applied Population Laboratory will conduct demographic analyses at the municipality level across the state of Wisconsin, using data from decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and municipality level data available from Wisconsin state agencies for the years 1990 through 2010. The initial analysis will identify municipalities in rural areas that do better than average with retaining or gaining young people. We will conduct separate analyses of the 20-24, 25-34, and 35-39 year-olds that make up the municipality population.A second graduate assistant will collect information about significant characteristics of each potential municipality identified in the demographic analysis that may make a place unique (i.e., presence of higher education institutions, prisons, large manufacturing facilities, important historical events, and other factors). This information will likely be a basis for excluding a municipality from study, since such unique factors would be too difficult to replicate in other communities. Both sources of information will be used to develop a profile for each potential municipality and will aid in the iterative process of identifying relevant municipalities for study.The initial demographic and qualitative data will show us the range of gainers and losers, and the members of the UW-Extension Engaging Young People to Sustain Communities, Families, and Farms (EYP) team will then come together to review the initial results and determine the final sampling frame of municipalities. We will take into account the diversity among Wisconsin rural communities to create a sampling frame.The graduate research assistants will then further develop the initial profiles of all communities in the final sampling frame, looking at income, poverty, employment and occupations, race, and other socioeconomic characteristics (i.e., educational attainment, renter/owner status, migration patterns) for young people in each of the identified communities. At this point in the research process, the EYP team will meet again to choose six to twelve case study municipalities to gather information on why they seem to be more successful at recruiting and/or retaining young people.In the second stage of the project, we will use a community-based research process to collaborate with local UW-Extension educators, government agency representatives, civic organization representatives, and young people in leadership positions in each of the case study municipalities.The research process will employ an intensive multi-methodological comparative case study design to identify variables impacting recruitment and retention of young people in that locality. In conducting case studies we are studying individual municipalities carefully, collecting information about the characteristics and conditions that attract and/or retain young people. Our definition of a case is a rural municipality from 1990-present. The structural boundaries are the geographical boundaries of the municipality with some allowance for its influence on the people who live outside of the formal boundaries, but interact with the municipality in regular and important ways (e.g., shopping, working, worshipping in the municipality). The historical boundaries of each case will be 1990 to the present, although most demographic data will be limited to 2010. Within those boundaries, we will be collecting data on changes in the number of young adults in the identified municipalities and the potential causes of changes in the age distribution.Similar to grounded theory, we are starting with an initial set of variables, while being prepared for new variables to appear and be added into the analysis. Various rural observers--some with big data and others with deep experience--propose a list of variables that include good career prospects (especially for starting a business), quality local schools (including those that serve non college-bound youth), high speed Internet, peer networking opportunities, support for diversity (including immigrants), programs designed to recruit young professionals, quality outdoor activities, creative class amenities and civic engagement. Data for some of factors are available in pre-existing form, and others can be garnered from municipal records, local media, and interviews with community leaders. This is quite a laundry list, however, and simply using a checklist (could such a thing be created) would hardly be adequate to predict whether a community would attract young adults. Our suspicion is that there may be various combinations of conditions that attract and retain various combinations of young people. Therefore, it is important to not just study whether a place has the resources on the checklist, but to study how young people in those places perceive and interact with those resources. To do this, we will collect data from young people themselves. In collaboration with local Extension educators and other leaders, we will develop methods appropriate to each location while still allowing us to collect data that will support case comparison.The Cooperative Extension faculty active in the Engaging Young People in Sustaining Communities, Families and Farms team have utilized several methods to gather qualitative community-level data from the perspective of youth and young adults, including focus groups with youth and young adults, surveys, the First Impressions process, where communities receive a report about the impressions of visitors from a similar community and become engaged in making changes to improve the community, a ripple mapping process to connect youth/adult partnership activities to community development outcomes. In addition, we will explore the usefulness of other methods, such as sending out a short electronic survey to existing e-mail lists of young people; using an intercept survey methods at locations where young people gather--ball games, bars, community event, farmers market, bowling alleys, etc.; scheduling meetings and recruiting participants via Facebook or local media; and meeting at workplaces where many young people are employed.Gaining access to data about these municipalities will, of course, be easier to the extent that we are able to build trusting relationships with local community leaders and honor local knowledge. One of the most effective ways of building such relationships and honoring local knowledge is to invite people who would normally be only passive subjects of research to also be co-designers of the research, following the best practices of community-based research. We will recruit local UW Extension educators in the county of each identified municipality to help bring together people in the municipality who can help operationalize variables, inform data gathering procedures, and even assist with data gathering where feasible. At the same time local participants are co-designing the research, they will also be learning what the literature is saying about attracting and retaining young people, and developing systematic understandings of their own communities. Our integrated activities, then, begin at the research design stage.Our integrated activities will continue throughout the case study research process as we check in with the local Extension educator and participants in each municipality along the way so that they can identify and correct potential errors in the case study reports, a process called "member checking" or "respondent validation". Finally, we will organize events to involve groups in learning about and engaging with the research findings in both the case study municipalities and other municipalities interested in the findings. We believe there will be wide interest among county boards and administrators, city councils/village boards, Chambers of Commerce, employers, schools, Extension staff, and a variety of local civic leaders.