-
Appendix
- Princeton University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Information about Middle Western communities and their residents was obtained through approximately 200 qualitative oral history and informant interviews. Each interview lasted about an hour and a half, with some ranging up to three hours, using semistructured interview guides that were tailored to different communities and included questions about personal life histories, community developments, perceptions , and values. The interviews were conducted in more than a hundred different communities, ranging in size from fewer than 100 people to more than 100,000. More than half were conducted in towns with fewer than 2,000. Respondents ranged in age from twenty-three to ninety-four and were currently or formerly employed in more than seventy different occupations, the most common of which were farmer, homemaker, pastor, school administrator, teacher, and town official. In addition to interviews with individuals, six focus groups were convened and their discussions tape-recorded. Interviews were conducted by Aislinn Addington, Brittany Hanstad, Bruce Carruthers, and Lori Wiebold-Lippisch, who were graduate students at the time in sociology at the University of Kansas; Cynthia Reynolds and Melissa Virts, an instructor and student, respectively, at Sterling College; Justin Farrell, a student from Nebraska at Princeton Theological Seminary; Sylvia Kundrats, Janice Derstine, and Stephen Myers of rural Pennsylvania; and Karen Myers, who also supervised the transcription of the interviews. Archival materials were obtained from numerous collections at college and university libraries and at local and state historical societies through personal visits and interlibrary loan. I am especially grateful for assistance from Ben Primer at Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library, Wangyal Shawa at Princeton’s Geospatial Information Center, Thomas Whitehead in Special Collections at Temple University ’s Paley Library, Christine DiBella at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Sharon M. Lake at the Iowa Women’s Archives of the University of Iowa Libraries , as well as the staffs at the Kansas State Historical Society, Oklahoma Historical Society, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Finney County Historical Museum, Finney County Register of Deeds Office, Stafford County Historical Society, Smith Center Public Library, Kansas State University Library, Pennsylvania State University Library, University of Minnesota Library, University of Wisconsin Library, North Dakota State Library, Vinton Public Library, Hagley Museum and Library, and Firestone and Stokes Libraries at Princeton University. Also of particular value were the electronic resources to which I had access through Princeton University, including America’s Historical Newspapers, Ancestry Library Edition, Jstor, Lexis-Nexis Academic , Library of Congress Online Collections, Making of America Digital Books and Journals, Moody’s, NewsBank, Proquest, and Securities and Exchange Commission Information. Quantitative data were obtained as electronic datafiles from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan and the Appendix 262 | Appendix Missouri Census Data Center. These archives proved to be the best sources for data at the level of incorporated places, counties, zip codes, and census tracts. Individuallevel census data were obtained from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series produced by Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King, and Chad Ronnander at the University of Minnesota Population Center. Additional datafiles and hard-copy tabular information were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau’s online collections, the Internal Revenue Service, the Reference USA and ESRI corporations, the Middle West’s state-level data centers, and departments of commerce, transportation, and education. Phillip Connor provided valuable assistance in assembling the various datafiles. The tables in this appendix provide details supplementing what could reasonably be summarized in the text and in notes about many of the demographic and economic variables discussed. These tables include state-by-state comparisons of some of the material examined in the event that readers may be interested in those details. Several of the tables present the results of key binary logistic and ordinary least squares regression analyses. All of the data from which these tables and other analyses presented in the text were derived are in the public domain at the archives previously mentioned. [3.80.129.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:08 GMT) Appendix | 263 Table 1. Population and Gross Domestic Product per Capita Relative to United States Population as Percentage of U.S. Population 1963 1970 1980 1990 2000 2006 Arkansas 0.99% 0.94% 1.01% 0.94% 0.95% 0.94% Iowa 1.45% 1.38% 1.28% 1.11% 1.04% 0.99% Kansas 1.17% 1.10% 1.04% 0.99% 0.95% 0.92% Minnesota 1.87% 1.86% 1.79...