Robert Wuthnow is a well-known Sociologist in the United States, former head of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, Professor Emeritus, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Born in Kansas in 1946, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kansas in 1968, his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975, and taught at the University of Arizona and Princeton University. He has published more than 30 books, including Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s (2013), Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future, 2015), The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America (2019), et al. He has received many honors and awards for his teaching and research achievements.
For a long time, research in the field of Sociology in the United States has focused on American cities and very little about the countryside. In recent years, due to the political polarization, social division, and prominent contradictions between urban and rural areas in the United States, rural issues have attracted more and more attention. To understand contemporary America, you can't avoid the small american countryside. As Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) pointed out in On Democracy in America: "The small town is the strength of the American nation, and the political life of the United States begins in the small town." ”
Professor Robert Woolsnow is a well-known American sociologist who has been studying rural issues in the United States for decades, especially through numerous field interviews and years of follow-up research, and has published a number of monographs focusing on social changes in small towns, explaining the past, present and future of small towns in the United States from a cultural perspective. Recently, the reporter interviewed Professor Wusno and listened to him talk about the development status of small towns in the United States, the ideas and cognition of local people, the role of small towns in today's American society, and his exploration, research and practice as a sociologist.
Sociological Methodology: In-depth Investigation and Qualitative Interviews
China Social Science Daily: First of all, please share how you started your academic career? How did your sociological training at the University of Kansas and the University of California, Berkeley, have had an impact on your subsequent academic research?
Wolsnow: I grew up on a small farm in Kansas and always thought I would grow up to be a farmer. However, my father passed away in my freshman year, which forced me to rethink the way forward. I didn't think there was anything particularly prominent about it, so I thought I might be able to become a university teacher in the future. I went through all sorts of difficult attempts to pursue my undergraduate major, considering business, economics, and psychology, but after reading the writings of Max Weber (1864-1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), I began to study statistics and became interested in social groups, and finally chose sociology. During his graduate school years at the University of California, Berkeley, the harvest was not as good as expected because he was catching up with the campus rebellion, but fortunately he adapted to the campus culture and met several good professors and received their guidance.
One of the professors who helped me the most was Charles Glock, from whom I learned about research and co-authored a book on adolescent bias. I also studied race relations with Professor Gertrude Selznick, choosing a class on black nationalism by teaching Troy Duster. All of this has benefited me a lot. For months when I was working on research topics, I often went to the Graduate Theological Union next door, interacted with teachers and classmates there, and read a lot of theological literature and writings. I learned more about the theory from two professors, Neil Smelser and Robert Bellah. Without the guidance of several teachers such as Glock and Bella, I would not have chosen the topic of religious consciousness for my graduation thesis.
The writings of Weber and Durkheim had a great influence on me. My research is heavily influenced by Weber's approach to historical sociology. I disagree with Durkheim's attempts to turn sociology into a science, but I benefited greatly from his study of the moral community.
China Social Science Daily: Can you briefly outline your research methods or theories?
Woosno: I'm eclectic in my research methods and theories. I have done many national surveys and attach great importance to quantitative analysis, but I am critical of polls because their effective return rate is too low, and the actual effect is greatly reduced to achieve accurate statistical analysis. I advocate a combination of research methods, with particular emphasis on qualitative interviews, ethnographic studies, and historical information, with the highest degree of matching is practical theory, which evolved from the writings of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and is based in large part on the works of John Dewey (1859-1952) and other American pragmatists and moral philosophers, and has become the main research method in the field of American sociology. Practical theory emphasizes social interaction, situation, control, and discourse power, which I think are all very important.
China Social Science Daily: What do fieldworks need special attention to at the practical level? Does the identity of the interviewee affect the interviewee's attitude and the content of the response? How do you balance these effects?
Wusnow: I think fieldwork requires special attention to the following points: (1) putting the research in context, that is, doing a good job in advance, and having a basic understanding of local cultural norms, history, and economic level; (2) being very clear about the goals and specific issues of your research; (3) adopting quota design to ensure that the interviewees can reasonably cover people of different races, social classes, genders, and ages; and (4) following all procedures for studying people as a subject, including obtaining the consent of the subject ;(5) Be honest about who you are and why you did the research, and allow respondents to ask questions about the research or decide whether to participate; (6) start with informal conversations and pilot interviews; (7) take good notes of the site during the interview and make timely first impressions; (8) in most cases, anonymize the people you've interviewed so that they are more willing to speak freely; (9) Don't rush to focus on topical and general things and ignore the specific vocabulary used by the respondents ;(10) Be open to collaborating with other researchers or assistants who help balance your perspective.
One of the mistakes that many new researchers make when conducting qualitative interviews is not to do more in-depth and meticulous preparation after summarizing five or six topics to be carried out, which often affects subsequent progress and makes the interview results unsatisfactory. For me, usually a 60-minute interview requires 10-15 pages of detailed questions and follow-up questions, which may not be used in the actual interview process, but adequate preparation can prompt the interviewer to think carefully, carefully and comprehensively in advance.
China Social Science Daily: Your research focuses on three areas: religion, civil society and community, and cultural sociology. What is the connection between these three?
Woosno: These are all "soft" topics, i.e. how to define them, measure them, and how to interpret the results are controversial and difficult to study precisely. However, such topics have aroused the interest of some pioneering scholars, including Weber, Durkheim, and Tocqueville, and still occupy an important place in sociological research in the United States and around the world. These topics are intertwined because religion is cultural, made up of communities, and part of civil society. The same can be said of communities, which are places of cultural construction and an important part of civil society. These topics, as Durkheim put it, also imply moral obligation. They guide, facilitate, and constrain our behavior as individuals, family members, and friends. Therefore, research in these areas requires the use of a variety of research methods. Surveys can generalize all members and study the relationships between variables; qualitative interviews can explore individuals' unique experiences and their discourses; and contextual and historical information gives us insight into the legacy and trajectory of social change.
I have never tried to create a research method that can be called my own unique research in my research. I don't think it's here, I think it's more for the sake of "selling fame", and it is easy to cocoon itself and lack multidimensional perspective. However, there are themes that recur in my writings, and community is an important theme because I believe that individualism is often a social issue, and that community reinforces civil society and profoundly shapes the choices we make as individuals. I'm also fascinated by community, from the intimate family relationships to the surroundings in which we live, to the larger transnational environment in which we live, and we are able to experience the charm of community at these different levels.
The cornerstone of American culture – the resilience of small towns
China Social Science Daily: Over the past 10 years, you have published 5 books on the topic of small town/country ("Reshaping the Heartland", "Small Town America", "Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State" (2016), "Left behind", "Bloodline: Understanding the American Country Family". （In the Blood: Understanding America’s Farm Families，2020））。 Please briefly summarize the results of your research in this field over the years.
Woosno: Reinventing the Heartland focuses on 11 states located between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, examining the changing image of agriculture, meat processing, Midwestern culture, and demographic changes from small towns to metropolises like Kansas City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. This monograph provides an in-depth analysis of the religion and politics of Kansas since the American Civil War through historical case studies. I also examined the religion and politics of Texas, which had joined the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War, for comparative study, the results of which Rough Ground was the result. Small Town America analyzes demographic trends and how small-town residents perceive changes in their lives, based on hundreds of qualitative interviews and U.S. census data. "Bloodline" is also based on a large number of qualitative interviews (interviewed about 200 farming families in four regions). The Left Behind is a popular book for non-professional readers that provides illustrative case studies that summarize previous research.
In short, the main conclusions of these books include: (1) rural counties and small towns with a population of less than 25,000, accounting for 17% of the U.S. population ;(2) the figure (the total population of 50 million and 60 million, respectively) is relatively stable, although the population of the American countryside has decreased relative to urban and suburban areas, but its absolute population has not declined; (3) the rural population changes with changes in the definition of the U.S. census, so it is important to be cautious when drawing relevant conclusions ;(4) The rural population is more concentrated in the Midwest, the South, and the mountains, and is relatively small along the coast of the United States; (5) compared with the urban population, the proportion of white people in the rural population is higher, the proportion of blacks is lower, and the overall Hispanic population has increased significantly; (6) culturally and economically, the rural population shows a diversified characteristics, from small towns focusing on high-tech industries and agricultural economies to poor towns dominated by mining, from communities with a majority of whites to communities with a hispanic majority, and so on ;(7) The characteristics of small towns are closely related to the local community, and residents have a strong sense of moral obligation to the values of their communities; (8) small-town residents are worried about the deterioration of their way of life and often feel threatened by urban trends and political issues that seem to be more urban in the decision-making of the federal government; (9) rural areas have a disproportionate demographic impact on state and national politics because of the federal government system in the United States; and (10) rural areas with declining populations often have some serious problems. They are associated with ageing, inadequate health care and lack of access to other social services.
China Social Science Daily: What are the characteristics of small towns in the United States? What are your main concerns?
Woosnor: Although the demographic and economic characteristics of small and rural areas have piqued my interest, the focus of my research has been primarily on examining these characteristics as context, i.e., how people living in small towns adapt, perceive, and choose the context. For example, I've been interested in listening to people talking about how they feel when schools in town close, when they have to drive to a farther town to see a doctor, when kids move out of town to find a job. At the same time, I've also been interested in learning about how new immigrants make their home in small towns, the importance people attach to the culture of slow-paced lifestyles and mutual acquaintances among neighbors, and why they are often able to discover the beauty of seemingly barren places. Many of the stories are poignant to hear, telling the hardships of the local people behind them, and also reflecting their resilience.
Small-town residents are not fundamentally different from Americans in other areas. They eat at the same fast food restaurants, shop at the same discount stores, watch the same TV shows, and vote in the same elections. However, the townspeople are very loyal to their communities. Just as city dwellers may be proud to be from Chicago or New York, small-town dwellers are proud to live in lesser-known places. They know everyone in the church they belong to, support the local library, talk about a recent football game, call out each other's names when they meet their neighbors at the grocery store, and so on, and so on, all of which make them proud. The town offers a sense of security, a connection that america used to have, a place where people are familiar with everything, but it also requires a sense of responsibility on the part of the inhabitants, the sense of responsibility to do their part to help their neighbors and to be a responsible citizen.
The town has always been a place where you can get to know the community more deeply. In small towns, a person often cannot avoid the influence of others by making decisions about what they do, what their hobbies do, and what they do politically. In other words, because they are a small circle of acquaintances, they are deeply influenced by the rest of the community and value this "sense of belonging." They feel apprehensive when they believe that the values that their community represents are threatened and believe that this threat is a threat to the community as a whole. As a result, they often criticize the federal government because it is too far away from them, always biased towards the city, taking care of the special interests of the inhabitants of urban areas, and interfering with the local freedoms they value. For these reasons, small-town residents sometimes tend to vote in presidential elections for "outsiders" or "mavericks" who they believe will change the system. As a result, presidential candidates who come from cities (who make up the majority) often present themselves as "outsiders" or emphasize that they come from families living in small towns. For example, both Presidents Reagan and Carter described themselves as political outsiders and emphasized their small-town origins.
Diversity and complexity
Political polarization and urban-rural division
China Social Science Daily: When you started studying the town and wrote "Small Town America", you mentioned that your "greatest wish is first of all to expect everyone to have a better understanding of the diversity and complexity of the town, and secondly, to expect everyone to have more respect for the town and more gratitude for the town's contribution to this society." How do you feel they have changed since you started studying small towns? Have your aspirations changed now?
Wolsnow: When I first started in this field, almost no other sociologist had done long-term research on "small town" or rural sociology, and on the contrary, almost every university sociology department thought that urban sociology should be offered. Worse still, we often see relevant charts that show that urbanization is the only important trend, that soon everyone will live in the city, as if the rural population does not exist, and if it does, it is purely boring and worthless. Then there was the 2016 presidential election, in which experts (mistakenly) believed that the outcome was decided by rural voters in the face of sudden results. So they scrambled to the American countryside to find out what was going on there, to find out what was going on. They usually look for someone in New York, send them to Iowa or Mississippi, talk to people there for hours, and then draw conclusions. Such conclusions are often pessimistic, implying nothing more than that rural Americans are stupid racists who have come out of touch with progressive and enlightened people. By then I had already done my research on this, so The Leftover is a small book that briefly summarizes the perspectives of previous research. Today's experts and scholars do know more about the town, not because of my books, but because over time, more scholars have begun to study the town.
A long-standing difficulty in studying this area is the U.S. Census's rough distinction between rural and urban areas and the media's overemphasis on differences, which has widened the urban-rural divide. For example, most articles about the American countryside are based on defined "rural" counties without paying more attention to the differences between those counties, or on the fact that rural residents' sense of identity with small towns far exceeds their sense of identity with their county. The problem is that, as we sociologists say, "within-category variation" is as much or more as "between-category variation." In other words, "The American countryside" is not "one thing," just as "American city" is not "one thing." Indeed, historically and topographically, rural America can be vastly different from another, including the type of economy in which people work (forestry, mining, livestock, food farming, light industry), ethnicity, community size, occupation, and income. For example, I wrote in My Bloodline that some farmers live on a bare basis and struggle to keep small farms within their families, while others use multimillion-dollar satellite-positioned tractors to cultivate thousands of acres of farmland. Some work intensively on a few acres of land to grow organic vegetables, while others export thousands of tons of wheat and corn. Similarly, in small towns with a population of over 1,000, there are people who choose to stay in the town to help their elderly parents and have to live in outdated houses, while in small towns with a population of 25,000, there are people who work and receive high salaries in professional positions that require a graduate degree. All of these differences reflect the complexity of the American countryside, not the same as traditional stereotypes.
Thankfully, there is a new wave of high-quality scholarship for this area of study. There has been a lot of valuable research into how small towns are affected by the oil and gas industry, the meat processing industry, school mergers, politics, technology, and immigration. At the same time, the changes within the town are not so great. Smaller towns continue to face population decline, while larger towns generally remain stable and, in some cases, grow. An important change, however, is that social media and satellite technology have brought more opportunities for people to live in small towns while also pursuing more diverse careers. In addition, through links with other towns, high-quality secondary education (high schools) in small towns benefit from the courses offered by each other, and the links between small town hospitals and large medical centres are becoming increasingly close. Small-town residents have never alienated or disconnected from friends, family, news, entertainment and media in the heart of the city, and these connections are stronger than ever.
China Social Science Daily: What do you think of the phenomenon of political polarization in the United States? How does this relate to urban-rural divisions? Since the 21st century, especially since the 2008 international financial crisis, how has the political ecology of rural areas changed?
Wolsnow: Politics in the United States is very polarized, and this problem has been a big problem for nearly half a century. Before 1980, most voters in the southern countryside voted for the Democratic Party, while most of the midwestern rural voters voted for the Republican Party, but since 1980, the majority of rural voters in both places have voted republican, meaning that the urban-rural divide coincides with the differences between the two parties. The religious sphere has also changed. For example, in Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland (2014), I analyze how Kansas has become more staunchly pro-Republican as conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants join forces against abortion, and for much of the state's history, Catholics and Protestants have not agreed on many things. In a U.S. presidential election, the difference between victory and defeat is usually small, so small that the group decision of any small group is enough to be the key to victory or defeat. As a result, "evangelicals" (conservative Christians) who oppose abortion and homosexuality are often credited with helping Republicans win, while evangelicals tend to live in small and rural areas. In other words, the urban-rural divide sometimes fits well with evangelical-non-evangelical differences. The Republican victory in the 2016 presidential election has sparked speculation about whether rural population is the deciding factor. The urban-rural gap received much less attention during the 2020 presidential election than in the 2016 election, possibly because the Democratic candidate won.
As a sociologist on big data and the epidemic
China Social Science Daily: From your student days to the present, what major changes have taken place in the field of sociology in terms of theory and research methods? Nowadays, big data is increasingly used in various academic fields, what are the implications for sociology?
Wolsno: Unfortunately, sociology as a discipline has become overly narcissistic: scholars are encouraged to write for niches, play concept games, and create a series of concepts that make the real world more obscure. Fortunately, the best sociologists have resisted this trend and instead focused on collecting and analyzing information on major social issues such as inequality, race, gender, family, community, immigration, international relations, and criminal justice. Thankfully, big data allows scholars to obtain more quantitative data, and more and more research grants are being made for ethnography and history. Although most of the poll data is worthless and untrustworthy, many organizations collect a lot of high-quality survey data and census data, and have better statistical analysis methods. Big data is often a useful complement to these approaches. Nowadays, social media has become an important part of people's daily lives, and data on web searches and emails has great research value. Of course, who has access to this data is also a concern.
China Social Science Daily: In a 2006 interview with the monograph "American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts To Be a Better Nation Fall Short," you mentioned, "For me, the most lasting impact may have been to raise my awareness as a sociologist. That is, how we culturally understand disasters that have occurred or are likely to occur". As a sociologist, how do you see the COVID-19 pandemic?
Wolsno: No one, including me, expected something as destructive as COVID-19 and take over the world the way it is now. A few years ago I wrote a book, Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (2010). It explores previous pandemics and natural disasters and points out that when disasters strike, there is a strong psychological urge to "do something" – "do whatever you want" to "exercise agency" and regain some sense of control. As the book argues, this tendency can lead to a variety of consequences, such as overreacting, underreacting, or wrong behavior, sometimes devastating. The best way to respond to sudden disasters is to engage in thoughtful, rational behavior based on accurate information. We also see the value of some of the thoughtful, information-based actions taken by public health officials in the context of the current pandemic outbreak, as a result of public health officials' assessments of the crisis and the responses scientists have made through innovative research. As it happens, social distancing and adherence to isolation restrictions are also psychologically beneficial. Unfortunately, in the United States, this response provides an excellent opportunity for conspiracy theorists to push for misinformation, negatively impacted by political polarization, making it difficult to deal with problems that should have been easier to solve.
However, it also brings interesting results on a broader level, including technology that allows people to meet online without having to meet face-to-face. Many people realize that we don't have to spend huge sums of money and waste time traveling, and that we can have good conversations and do business effectively online. Of course, the pandemic is yet another powerful indication of the extent to which many countries of the world are interconnected.
China Social Science Daily: Over the years, have you had medium- and long-term plans for your academic research and publication? What advice do you have for young scholars?
Woosnor: Early in my academic career, after completing my thesis and publishing several books, I moved from research to historical research and decided to start the "Ten Year Project." Over the next decade, I wrote a number of treatises on major cultural changes in Western Europe, and I received some research grants. This benefited from my second decade of research, which focused mostly on the field of religion, which gave me the opportunity to study the relationship between religion and art in the United States, immigration and politics, and stimulated my interest in discourse analysis and practical theory. Since then, I've done research on social change in the Midwest based on my upbringing in Kansas and the focus on issues related to it, as well as numerous interviews based on topics like small-town, rural, and rural life. Recently, I returned to the sociology of religion.
For young scholars, the choice of research topic at the beginning is very critical, and it takes at least 5-10 years or more to study anything, so it should be a topic that researchers really care about and have great enthusiasm for!
Source: China Social Science Network - China Social Science Daily Author: Chu Guofei
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