Rural Sociology Faculty and Graduate Students Partner with Community Development Extension and the Focus on Fayette Development Group
David O'Brien, professor of Rural Sociology, and Larry Dickerson, community development specialist.
Mary Grigsby, associate professor of Rural Sociology, and members of the first Focus on Fayette meeting.
Dick Taylor and Melissa Spain, graduate student in Rural Sociology, at the Focus on Fayette meeting.
Cathy Johnmeyer, member of the Focus on Fayette development team, and Faustina Williams, graduate student in Rural Sociology.
Melissa Spain, David O'Brien, Faustina Williams, Cathy Johnmeyer and Robin Triplett, Fayette City administrator/city clerk and member of the Focus on Fayette development team, at the second Focus on Fayette meeting.
Partnership Creates Knowledge About Consumer Attitudes and Behavior to Use in Community Economic and Cultural Development
- Presentation (PDF)
Update (Oct 17, 2011):On September 29 Rural Sociology Department graduate students Amanda Sims and Faustine Williams and faculty members David O’Brien and Mary Grigsby presented survey results from a survey of consumer attitudes, behaviors and needs conducted by students and faculty for the community group. Larry Dickerson, Community Development Specialist, University of Missouri Extension, working with the Focus on Fayette group in development efforts accompanied the group. Presentation slides have been widely shared with community members and are attached here to make them even more widely accessible.
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The Department of Rural Sociology and Community Development Extension are partnering with the Focus on Fayette Development group to provide information about rural people’s consumption patterns to improve economic development plans.
Community Development Specialist Larry Dickerson, is working closely with the Focus on Fayette group in their development activities and facilitated the linkages between community members and faculty and graduate students.
A baseline survey of household consumption behaviors and perceived needs and desires for different types of goods and services of residents, to identify general patterns of consumption based on input from the members of the Focus on Fayette group will be developed and administered by students, Melissa Spain, Faustine Williams and Jordan Dawdy, who are in O’Brien’s Community Survey Research course in the Spring of 2011.
The results will be reported to the community. Associate Professor Mary Grigsby will follow-up by doing an in-depth qualitative study of selected households to provide “real person” accounts of how and why people consume as they do and how it links with their community attachment and sense of community identity.
Johanna Reed Adams, Ph.D., of Community Development Extension, and Grigsby will draw from this research to facilitate community planning on consumption and community development through workshops and publications and will share what is learned in Fayette with other rural communities.
Some key goals of the research are:
- To understand why people make certain consumption choices and not others
- To understand what is attractive and not attractive about consumption choices in the local community
- To understand how consumption behavior and attitudes influence community attachment
- Understanding Consumption patterns of different groups in the community
- Why people make the choices they make
- What venues and products are desired by people and what realistically can be offered at the local level
- To go beyond the statistical data to understand how “real people” make decisions about consumption and how this affects their community attachment
- To generate knowledge that targets consumer behavior as a key factor in community development for rural communities
