Disciplines

Rural Sociology

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Rural Sociology." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/rural-sociology.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Rural Sociology. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/rural-sociology

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-rural-sociology,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Rural Sociology},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/rural-sociology},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The study of the people the rest of this atlas's disciplines grow food around: farm families, rural communities, land tenure, and the migration and poverty patterns that follow a countryside's fortunes. It took shape as a named field in the United States in the 1910s, its institutional roots running through the land-grant universities and the USDA, and its conventional starting point is President Theodore Roosevelt's 1908 Commission on Country Life, chaired by the horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey. It runs broader than the sociology of agriculture, its own major subfield, which narrows to how agricultural change itself reshapes rural life.

Facts

Central Question

Rural sociology is a field of sociology traditionally associated with the study of social structure in rural areas. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections