In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 A Natural Experiment in Iowa Towns  It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change. —Clarence Darrow A s Clarence Darrow points out, adaptability is critical for every living species . It also has been crucial for U.S. small towns. Over the past halfcentury , many small towns in rural areas literally have died off. In spite of the fact that for most Americans rural imagery is synonymous with farm imagery , the mass rural-to-urban migration and declining family size meant that in one generation, farmers became a marginal group in the United States. Between 1946 and 1970, more than 21 million people moved from farms into urban and suburban areas.1 Migration made it nearly impossible for communities to maintain themselves. The major bedrocks of rural communities—churches, civic organizations, and schools—could not continue with so few people and ceased to operate. As rural schools consolidated throughout the Midwest, some communities became ghost towns. The middle class left small towns, leaving behind those too poor or too rooted to pick up and start over and leading to increases in rural poverty. Despite a growth spurt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the farm crisis that followed decimated what was left of many of the smallest communities. Scholars and pundits have cited many reasons for these phenomena: laborsaving technological change, increasing ease of transportation, the growth of agribusiness, improvements in public health that allow people to have fewer children and to live longer, economic change and globalization, the arrival of big-box stores in small towns, the necessity of a college degree to obtain a wellpaying job, a materialist culture, changes in family structure, government policies on social welfare and agriculture. The list goes on and on. Regardless of the source of change, the landscape of small-town America looks very different today from how it did 60 years ago. To survive, communities have had to adapt. 28 Chapter 2 Although immigration from Latin America and Asia is not the only survival strategy for small communities, the survival and growth of many towns have depended on it.2 In communities where residents were nearly all of European descent, and most were third-, fourth-, or even fifth-generation Americans, these newcomers meant substantial change to the composition of their communities. Examining the effect of immigration on the attitudes of native residents in small towns poses several problems. Most significant, to study change of any kind, the best designs involve a pre-test—measures of the outcomes of interest prior to the change. In this case, it would be great to have measures of how young residents felt about immigration, diversity, and civic engagement before immigrants arrived in their communities. Without a crystal ball, however, most of us miss the appropriate window of opportunity to gauge attitudes before change occurs. In the absence of a pre-test, this study utilizes a natural experimental design. It compares attitudes in two immigrant-receiving communities—Perry and Storm Lake, Iowa—with those in three non-immigrant-receiving towns of Boone, Carroll, and Harlan, Iowa. This chapter demonstrates the appropriate nature of this design by establishing that, prior to the arrival of immigrants in Perry and Storm Lake, the five towns were similar across many of the most important social, political, and economic indicators. In doing so, it provides the background necessary for the subsequent chapters to interpret the book’s findings and discuss their implications. Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences A natural experiment is a naturally occurring instance of an observable phenomenon that approximates the properties of a controlled experiment. The control and treatment groups self-select into these groups in ways that are not associated with the outcomes of interest. The approach consists of comparing systems that are very similar, but “differ with respect to the factors whose influence one wishes to study.”3 One advantage of natural experiments is that those being observed do not know they are part of an experiment and therefore behave naturally, a problem with some controlled experiments in the social sciences.4 One of the major problems with natural experiments, as with most social science research, is the possibility that some other explanation is the “true” cause of the outcomes under investigation. Researchers refer to this as a problem of an omitted explanatory variable. Because the phenomenon under study is naturally occurring, and the researcher does not control assignment to the comparison...

Share