Rural-Urban Differences in Attitudes and Behavior in the United States

Abstract

Recent American data reveal moderate to sub stantial farm-nonfarm differences on a few kinds of attitudes and behavior, but since farm people now are only about 4 percent of the population, the farm-nonfarm distinction can not account for much of the total variation of any kind of attitudes or behavior. The kinds of attitudes and behavior which differ substantially between farm and nonfarm people usually differ monotonically by community size; hence, "ruralism" seems to some extent to characterize residents of the smaller dense settlements and, to a lesser extent, those of intermediate-sized cities. Furthermore, city residents with rural backgrounds tend to retain rural attitudes and be havior characteristics, size of community of origin being a stronger predictor of some attitudes than size of com munity of current residence. Although the association of community size with a more or less representative list of attitudinal variables is weak, such correlates of community size as age and socioeconomic status do not largely ac count for the larger associations, which probably reflect a tendency for social and cultural change to occur earlier in the larger communities. The explanatory utility of size of community of origin and of residence seems less than that of age and education but at least as great as that of several other explanatory variables favored by social scientists, such as family income and occupational prestige.