Shrink-Smart Small Towns
Dr. David Peters received his Ph.D. in rural sociology from the University of Missouri - Columbia in 2006, with the dissertation Understanding Rural Poverty Clusters: The Intersection of Agriculture, Economic Structure and Locality Under Postindustrialism.
His primary research areas include: (1) spatial inequality and economic restructuring; (2) human dimensions of agriculture and the green economy; and (3) community and methods dimensions of criminology. His secondary research area is applied rural development and extension practice. There are three themes that unite these disparate research areas. First, he focuses on meso-scale places and counties, rather than on macro-scale states and nations. Second, he focuses on applying quantitative methods to consistent and comprehensive secondary data, rather than applying qualitative methods to case study data. Lastly, he focuses on the economic shift away from an industrial economy to a post-industrial one to understand how this affects job opportunities for the poor, former prisoners, and those engaged in agriculture.