Recent efforts to explain the persistence of rural poverty have made frequent use of the concept of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing poverty. The dynamic dimension of the poverty trap concept makes it a potentially useful tool for understanding conditions of persistent poverty, especially in circumstances where outside interventions…

Poverty is a significant problem in rural America. Gaining access to economically marginalized rural populations in order to recruit individuals to participate in a research study, however, is often a challenge. This article compares three different nonprobability sampling techniques that have been used to recruit rural, low-income…

The number of the world's food insecure rose at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite these negative developments, however, a 2010 United Nations report argues that food security could be improved if development efforts are supported by government programs that target smallholder farmers. This report is significant…

Rapid Hispanic population growth represents a pronounced demographic transformation in many nonmetropolitan counties, particularly since 1990. Its considerable public policy implications stem largely from high proportions of new foreign-born residents. Despite the pressing need for information on new immigrants in nonmetro counties and a…

Researchers are increasingly recognizing space as a key axis of inequality. Scholars concerned with spatial inequality have called for special attention to issues of comparative advantage and disadvantage across space as well as the consideration of the subnational scale. This study draws on these ideas by examining the relationship between work…

Poverty is frequently conceptualized as an attribute of either people or places. Yet residential movement of poor people can redistribute poverty across places, affecting and reshaping the spatial concentration of economic disadvantage. In this article, we utilize 1995 to 2000 county-to-county migration data from the 2000 United States decennial…

Research has thoroughly documented how out-migration of the educated and skilled from rural areas leaves behind a poorer population and creates pockets of rural poverty. Recently, studies have recognized that the poor are also geographically mobile and that poverty migration patterns can reinforce rural poverty concentrations. In this process,…

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine perceptions of environmental health and justice among Native Americans in a rural Oklahoma community. Residents live near the Continental Carbon Company, which manufactures a rubber compound know as "carbon black." Ponca tribal members believe their…

Regression results reveal there are geographic determinants of poverty. Even when demographic, labor-market, institutional, and fiscal correlates of poverty are controlled for, counties bordering high-poverty counties have poverty rates 3.4-3.8 percentage points higher simply because of their location. Economic development resources should focus…

During 1981-84, migration patterns of both the poor and nonpoor consistently reinforced preexisting spatial concentrations of poverty. High migration rates of the poor into and out of high poverty counties suggest an equilibrium condition. A locale's persistent poverty may result not from lack of opportunity but from an opportunity structure that…

Individualist and structuralist perspectives on poverty were integrated by examining the relationship between "people poverty" and "place poverty" in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas, using a multilevel framework. Both household compositional factors (including education) and contextual factors contributed to the nonmetro-metro difference in…

A pervasive anti-statism often blinds us to the democratic victories in the past and thus to possibilities in our future. This article argues that big government can democratize society and uses historical investigation to make the point. The study of history emancipates us from the tyranny of the present. Progressive social change has come about…

This research compares the likelihood of exiting TANF with and without employment and the effects of important state TANF rules on welfare exits in more disadvantaged (large Rustbelt cities and poor southern nonmetro) and less disadvantaged (other metro and other nonmetro) areas during the 1996-2003 post-welfare reform period. Hierarchical…

Poor people make use of a variety of contextually relevant resources to pursue their livelihood strategies, and there is wide empirical evidence that opportunities and constraints for accessing these may vary considerably for women and men, particularly in the rural areas of developing countries. In this article, micro-evidence from a case study…

Analyzes data with individual and county level variables. During 1984-86, poor Hispanic youth and youth living in high-poverty counties were more likely to move to another county than were nonpoor youth or those in low-poverty counties. However, multilevel interactions between individual status and contextual status affected these relationships.…