Class of 2011 Abstract / OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the pharmaceutical needs of a rural Arizona border town in order to determine the feasibility of building a pharmacy within the San Luis Walk-In Clinic. METHODS: Surveys included questions regarding general information such as education level and length of time living in the community, health literacy, household medications and medical supplies, pharmacy and prescription information, travel time to current pharmacy, level of satisfaction of current pharmacy, and interest in additional pharmaceutical clinical services. Only questions in the public health survey that were related to the pharmaceutical needs assessment were reviewed and analyzed. RESULTS: 127 pharmaceutical needs assessment surveys were collected and analyzed. Of note, 78% of survey respondents reported traveling outside of San Luis to purchase medications. 76% of households are either not satisfied or slightly satisfied with their pharmacy. Up to 65% of households are interested in additional pharmaceutical services such as medication therapy management (MTM) and education classes on various disease states. CONCLUSION: The findings from the surveys strongly suggest that the residents in San Luis would welcome an additional pharmacy to their community. Less time would be used commuting out of town to purchase medications and additional clinical services would be well appreciated within San Luis. Thus, it is recommended that a pharmacy be built within the San Luis Walk-In Clinic.

In this dissertation, I use a single qualitative case study methodology, participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews to explore how a rural school’s closure influenced the lives of residents in one rural farming community: Limerick, Saskatchewan, Canada. Three “stand alone” papers comprise this dissertation. In the first paper, I investigate the impacts of the school’s closure on rural families. In the second paper, I explore the ways Limerick School’s closure affected adults without school-aged children. In the final paper, I assess school closure’s impact on gendered volunteer roles. Using social ecological theory and socialist feminist theory, I argue that the school’s closure had far-reaching implications for community members and that these implications varied depending on stage of life, gender, and roles within the family and community contexts. Together, these papers not only make a contribution to filling the gap in existing literature pertaining to rural school closures, but they also strengthen our scholarly understanding of the school-community relationship in the rural context.

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The central argument of this thesis is that participative approaches to evaluating voluntary rural community-based organisations are an effective tool for organisational learning and ensuing rural community development. This proposition is explored through the evaluation and strategic planning of the Southern Riverina Rural Advisory Service, a community-based counselling organisation. The Service works with families experiencing financial hardship and associated stress. The thesis is multi-faceted and generic issues included: the importance of commitment by rural communities and organisations to creating frameworks for understanding and acting in integrated ways to the diversity, inter-relatedness and conflict of issues, wishes and needs of members, and to develop the capacity to transform contexts of dependency-oriented crisis situations to ones of self-responsible, interdependent change; the need to view contexts through integration of local, regional, national and global perspectives and to develop networks to integrate understanding and action; and to continue learning how to better enhance organisational and community-based learning. / Master of Science (Hons)

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Gerad D. Middendorf / Although rural communities have great diversity, each rural community has resources that can be invested to develop community capital resources. Every rural community not only has resources that are held by local community members, each rural community is also embedded in a larger social network that has the power to exchange resources for its own benefit. Therefore, the holders of a rural community’s resources also have the power to influence the distribution of these resources. As a way to determine who holds the community’s capital resources and begin the community development process, Flora et al. (2006) encouraged rural community development practitioners to perform an assessment of their community’s built, financial, political, social, human, cultural, and natural capitals. The case study method was utilized for the research conducted in this study because of its ability to aid in determining the success or failure of Norton County Economic Development’s Downtown Program, which focused on the revitalization of Norton County’s downtown areas. It was revealed that many of the Downtown Development programs were successfully implemented because the resources that were controlled by local and outside power structures, which also constituted the dynamic and interactive power structure within that system, were identified, mobilized, and utilized in this rural economic development program. This study contributed to sociological knowledge because it looked at the ability of dynamic and interactive power structures to control capital resources in rural community development. As well, this study extended the literature on the importance of participation, solidarity, and the exchange of resources in rural community development, and added to the research on the use of community capitals in identifying and utilizing capital resources in planning rural community development programs that are successful.

Community colleges across the nation have struggled with retention issues for decades. Questions of why students drop out and what factors influence the decision to remain or leave college prior to completion persist. Research has uncovered some of the influences on student persistence in higher education; however, community colleges, and to an even lesser degree, vocational programs, have received little attention. This case study examined the influences on student retention in a rural community college vocational education program which has a record of high retention and persistence to graduation rates. The qualitative research methodology employed examined the perceptions of seven current program students, nine program graduates, the sole program faculty member, and nine program advisory committee members. The results of the study yielded the following themes as factors which influence retention in this particular setting: program design, faculty, cohort, social aspects, the instructional environment, institutional support/programs, industry-sponsored events, and industry contributions. The findings suggest that community college student retention in vocational settings is a multi-dimensional phenomenon affected by a host of factors which collectively influence a student’s ability to persist to graduation. Future research regarding this topic may be able to utilize the results of this study to further advance the knowledge of student retention strategies in community college vocational settings. / text

Doctor of Education / Department of Educational Leadership / Sarah J. Fishback / A growing body of literature suggested that students who come from poverty have potential risk factors that included: being the first in the family to attend a college, being poorly prepared for the academic rigors of college and requiring remedial developmental coursework. Students from poverty who accessed the rural community college also struggled with rising tuition and fees, as well as the cost of books. Students from poverty had greater struggles with social and personal issues and experienced lower completion rates. Limited research has been conducted with this segment of rural students from poverty backgrounds attending community college in the rural setting. This dissertation described a phenomenological case study approach to identify the impact of poverty on the achievement and persistence of rural students who access the rural community college. A small community college in the Midwest representing a rural population and a high percentage of poverty students was selected as the site for the study. The goal of this research was to explore perceived factors by students receiving Pell Grants and in developmental courses while in attendance at a rural community college in order to identify possible strategies to ameliorate barriers in their rural community college experience. The research found this student population to be at high risk with multiple risk factors. In addition to being developmental and receiving Pell Grants, other scholarships combined with working part-time and often full-time were needed to supplement student finances; poor high school academic preparation and counseling; lacked the computer skills necessary for college coursework; being non-traditional; lack of consistency in tutoring services; and being food short and hungry. These additional risk factors made this segment of the student population fragile.

A substantial body of international research exists dealing with the experiences of unemployment. However, there is relatively little research focusing on unemployed people with postgraduate degrees and no research on qualified unemployed teachers in South Africa. Against this background, this research explored the experiences of eight unemployed Black African teachers in a rural village in the Limpopo province, South Africa by means of face-to-face, in-depth interviews. The study found that the majority of those interviewed had chosen teaching because it had a vocation or calling and that this aspect of their career choice made their experiences of unemployment even more painful. It was also noted that being unemployed was a particularly difficult state to accept because of the emphasis on the importance of education in the communities from which the teachers came and the accompanying belief that a tertiary qualification would almost inevitably secure employment. It also found that the participants expressed a number of the negative experiences such as loss of self esteem and a sense of self worth. More specifically, it was found that the inability to fulfil the traditional gender role as head of a household was one of the most significant problems confronting the unemployed men. Additional findings of particular interest include the fact that by contrast with other research, this group of teachers did not experience the extent of social isolation so often found in the international literature. It was suggested that a possible explanation for this finding related to the particularly strong social ties that operate in Black African rural communities in South Africa. A number of suggestions concerning further research into the experiences of unemployed graduates are made in the concluding sections of the study. It is suggested, for example, that it would be useful to explore the extent to which the experiences of unemployed Black African teachers in urban communities relate to those described in this research.

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