Rural sociology is a field of sociology traditionally associated with the study of social structure and conflict in rural areas. It is an active academic field in much of the world, originating in the United States in the 1910s with close ties to the national Department of Agriculture and land-grant university colleges of agriculture.
Kingsley Davis was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow.
Oliver Edwin Baker was an American economic geographer.
The Office of Population Research (OPR) at Princeton University is the oldest population research center in the United States. Founded in 1936, the OPR is a leading demographic research and training center. Recent research activity has primarily focused on healthcare, social demography, urbanization, and migration. The OPR's research has been cited in numerous articles by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
Charles B. Nam was born in Lynbrook, New York on March 25, 1926, and currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida. He was a Professor of Sociology for 31 years with one of his most important contributions being the Nam-Powers Index measuring occupational status.
Migration studies is the academic study of human migration. Migration studies is an interdisciplinary field which draws on anthropology, prehistory, history, economics, law, sociology and postcolonial studies.
Dudley L. Poston Jr. is an American academic whose areas of study include Demography, Human Ecology, and Sociology.
Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.
Jane Menken, née Golubitsky, is an American sociologist and demographer known for her work in sociology in public and international affairs, population studies, social statistics.
Margaret Loyd Jarman "Marney" Hagood was an American sociologist and demographer who "helped steer sociology away from the armchair and toward the calculator". She wrote the books Mothers of the South (1939) and Statistics for Sociologists (1941), and later became president of the Population Association of America and of the Rural Sociological Society.
Ann Ratner Miller was an American sociologist and demographer in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, described as "a pioneer in the study of human migration and patterns of labor force participation," "part of the first generation of demographers that assembled and analyzed census data to undertake the first systematic study of internal migration within the United States."
Joan Huber is an American sociologist and professor emeritus of sociology at Ohio State University. Huber served as the 79th president of the American Sociological Association in 1989. Huber taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1967 to 1971, eventually moving to Illinois, where she taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. While instructing numerous sociology courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, Huber served as the director of Women's Studies Program for two years (1978–1980), and then became the head of the Department of Sociology in 1979 until 1983. In 1984, Huber left Illinois for an opportunity at the Ohio State University, where she became the dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, coordinating dean of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, and senior vice president for academic affairs and university provost. During her time, Huber was president of Sociologists for Women in Society from 1972 to 1974, the Midwest Sociological Society from 1979 to 1980, and the American Sociological Association from 1988 to 1989. Being highly recognized for her excellence, in 1985 Huber was given the Jessie Bernard Award by the American Sociological Association. Not only was Huber an instructor of sociology at multiple institutions or president of different organization, she also served different editorial review boards, research committees, and counseled and directed many institutions on their sociology departments.
Emily M. Agree is an American sociologist. She is a professor of sociology in the Departments of Sociology and Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University, and associate director at the Hopkins Population Center.
Nancy A. Naples is an American sociologist, and currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she is also director of graduate studies. She has contributed significantly to the study of community activism, poverty in the United States, inequality in rural communities, and methodology in women's studies and feminism.
Charles Elson Lively was an American sociologist and among the early pioneers in rural sociology. He conducted research into rural habits and ways of life in rural communities throughout the midwest, though most of his work focused on Ohio and Missouri. As Brunner notes in The Growth of a Science: A Half Century of Rural Sociological Research in the United States, Lively's work was instrumental in demonstrating the regionality of social conditions. Lively was among the first sociologists to empirically demonstrate variability in social factors as a useful metric in defining regions, rather than using biophysical characteristics alone. During his tenure at the University of Missouri, he became increasingly interested in rural healthcare and demographics. Lively was president of the Rural Sociological Society from 1942 to 1943. Later in life, the State of Missouri awarded him the W. Scott Johnson Award for his work in rural areas of the state.
Fern "Bunny" Kaley Willits is an American rural sociologist and professor emerita at Pennsylvania State University known for research about rural women and youth. Willits has published over 70 academic papers and 14 books and she is recognised as a "distinguished rural sociologist" by the Rural Sociological Society.
Charles Josiah Galpin was an American academic. Galpin was a trailblazer of rural sociology, known for advancing research in analysis of rural populations, rural standards of living, rural social organization, and social structures. Galpin was a rural sociologist, professor, author, pastor, and advocate for rural populations. He published 112 works in 245 publications in one language and 2,667 library holdings including The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community (1915); Rural Life (1918); My Drift into Rural Sociology (1938); and Rural Social Problems (1924). His early career set the stage for his influential contribution as the Head of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, United States Department of Agriculture. The reach of his contributions extend beyond rural sociology to include contributions in ecology and public health.
Dorothy Hope Tisdale Eldridge was an American physical educator, demographer, and statistician.
Gelia Tagumpay Castillo was a Filipino sociologist. She specialized in rural sociology and was a pioneer of the concept of participatory development. She was a university professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Her 1977 book Beyond Manila examined rural development in the Philippines. She was named a National Scientist of the Philippines in 1999.
