Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Study of the Changing Socio-Economic Landscape of Nonmetropolitan America

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SBR-9627842 Judith Kenny Rina Ghose U. Wisconsin, Milwaukee This doctoral-dissertation improvement award supports a study of in-migrants to a non-metropolitan county in Montana. The investigators propose that the kind of migration occurring in this case differs from more common patterns of migration from metropolitan areas in the wealth and the motivations of the in-migrants. They will compare migrants' origins, motivations, and socio-economic characteristics to these patterns in a process that has been called "rural gentrification," a phrase most often used in British research on a perhaps-similar British experience in the past 20 years. They will also compare the Montana and the British experience in terms of the results of in-migration on public and private resource ownership and use. The Student intends to make use of Census records, real-estate-sales records, and questionnaires and interviews with in-migrants and other inhabitants of the county. The research reflects the fact that particular areas of the American West are changing rapidly because of an influx of professionals who can either work far away from their actual clients or markets or who can spend much time and money away from their work-related residences. The geographic literature in the United States does not include much study of these changes from a cultural and social perspective. This study should be important both in interpreting these trends based on one case, and in catalyzing further research in this area.