About the ISU survey

AMES ? Iowa State University?s Department of Sociology will be compiling its third statewide survey in 2014.

ISU also compiled surveys in 1994 and 2004 based on responses from almost 15,000 residents living in 99 Iowa rural communities.

Called the Rural Development Initiative (RDI) Project in 1994, it was jointly supported by ISU?s Experiment Station and Extension Service to establish a baseline of living conditions in rural Iowa.

Participating communities ranged in size from 500-10,000 residents and were randomly selected from each of Iowa?s 99 counties. This enabled ISU to determine the quality of life throughout rural Iowa as viewed by residents themselves.

In 2004, ISU received funding from USDA?s National Research Initiative to replicate the 1994 study.

Following procedures used in 1994, ISU prepared 99 individualized community reports for local distribution about whether and how each community had changed over that 10-year span.

As part of that research, researchers studied the extent and nature of community economic shocks that had occurred in each town since 1994. Leaders in 74 towns identified a total of 152 shocks including the loss and gain of employers, natural disasters and changes in government services.

The 1994 and 2004 reports are available at http://www.soc.iastate.edu/rdiweb/PublicationsAndReports.html.

ISU has again received funding from USDA?s National Institute for Food and Agriculture to conduct a third wave of this study in 2014. As in the previous two studies, 150 residents in each of the 99 towns will be surveyed.

Within the next two weeks, researchers will contact randomly selected households in each town by mail and ask a designated adult in the household to participate in the study. Each person who receives a survey represents 20 to 35 other town residents. Consequently, it is vitally important that those selected complete and return the survey.