AbstractsSociology

"The Ozark Region of Missouri is rapidly undergoing a definite social and economic change. thru markedly improved methods of communication and transportation the eighteenth century culture of this region is being metamorphosed into a twentieth century culture. Where the Ozarker of a generation ago was a strongly individualistic frontiersman in his outlook on life, he is now in the process of becoming a citizen of a larger and more complex society. The telephone, the radio, and the concrete highway, together with the cheap automobile, have made the customs and many of the folkways and mores of the Ozark people obsolete, and have led this same people to accept the ways of a fast-moving industrial civilization with all of its blessings and all of its curses. In this changed setting, poverty and dependency must be more strenuously and carefully dealt with than under the old frontier regime; if we wish to avoid the serious and costly consequences which attend these conditions in regions already modernized. As twentieth century standards are accepted, the poverty-ridden Ozarker, urban and rural, will exhibit an increased criminal rate and will behave otherwise asocially in a most alarming fashion, for this has been the history of other like communities. This paper was undertaken with the idea in mind that Phelps County, Missouri, is a typical Ozark community, and that a survey of poverty and dependency in this political subdivision would give a reasonably accurate picture of conditions throughout the entire region, excepting, of course, those areas that are metropolitan in complexion" – Introduction, p. 1-2.