Since the arrival of Robert and Helen Lynd to Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s, Muncie has perhaps become the most studied city. The Lynds, who referred to Muncie as "Middletown," produced two studies on the city looking at sociological topics. In the 1970s, Theodore Caplow and a team of researchers reproduced the study with Middletown residents to create Middletown III. A recent, still unpublished, Middletown IV was conducted in the city again by Caplow's group in 1999.Yet in all of these years of studies and through all of the attention the studies received in various media, the human side of Muncie has been neglected. There have been no articles written about the people behind the statistics, the very citizens who make up Muncie. Nor has much elaboration been done concerning the geographic class divide that the Lynds first identified in the 1920s.For these reasons, four families were sought to be profiled in-depth concerning the same topics that were presented in the Middletown studies: work, education, family, religion, and leisure and community activities. They were also asked for their opinions on Muncie as a community. To characterize the existence or prove the nonexistence of the geographic class division in the city, two families were selected from each side of town using Indiana 32/Jackson Street as the division between north and south Muncie.Though the four families are only a very small part of the population in Muncie, together they fulfilled most of the Middletown studies' findings, including that there is indeed a division between north and south Muncie. / Department of Journalism
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/187261 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Shannon, Stacey |
| Contributors | Sumner, David E. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | ii, 140 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
| Coverage | n-us-in |
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