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The author discusses rural community development in the United States by tracing its historical origins, reviewing its status within sociology, contrasting development of the community with development in the community, and reviewing three basic strategies of rural community development: authoritative intervention, client-centered intervention, and radical reform. The author con cludes that federal intervention policies have created elaborate and complex interdependencies among state and federal governments, the private sector, and communities, and that rural community development requires a sociology that maps these relationships and provides explanations for changes in them.

There is growing recognition that economic development in advanced indus trial societies involves massive capital migration from one industrial sector to another, from one community to another, and even from one nation to another.Economic development is a continual process of opening new areas, spatially and sectorally, while closing others. Development projects in rural communi ties provide a timely and valuable laboratory in which to learn how the restructuring of advanced industrial societies affects local social structures.This chapter extracts and reviews what has been learned from studies of communities coping with rural industrialization and natural resource develop ment, especially large-scale projects. Particular attention is given to changes in employment patterns, income, population, agriculture, local businesses, and public sector costs and revenues. The findings reveal an underlying tension between the free movement of capital, on the one hand, and community stability and worker welfare, on the other hand. The authors conclude that local social changes are integral elements of external processes of economic develop ment. They may be understood by directing attention to the spatial patterns of social, economic. and political inequality and to the mechanisms that generate and sustain unevenness.

In this study, the reliability and validity of student reports of parental SES characteristics was investigated. Using panel data for student reports and independent surveys of both mothers and fathers, it was found that student reports were relatively stable over time and were more reliably measured for parental education than for either father's income or occupation. The validities of the reports were, for all but income reports, moderate. The validity of income reports was very low. It was concluded that student reports should be utilized with some caution, and, where possible, direct measures of parental SES should be used.