Associate Professor of Sociology Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD, is the co-PI on a $590,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) to help understand the challenges facing rural governments in the U.S. 

McMillan Lequieu is collaborating on the project with Paige Kelly, PhD, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and the National Association of Counties. Kelly, the PI of the project, is conducting a large-scale survey of leaders in the 3,000 counties in the United States. This nationwide survey, now in its fifth iteration since 2001, calls on county leaders across the U.S. to report on the work they are doing towards bettering their communities.  

McMillan Lequieu will lead the project’s qualitative research, conducting interviews and ethnographies across a subset of counties throughout the United States.  

“Paige’s work can answer what exactly counties are doing. I'm asking them why,” McMillan Lequieu explained. “That's something a survey can't answer. I will go to communities and actually walk the streets or go on drives with county leaders and see what matters to them. I’ll look at how ideas or discourses have changed over time.”  

McMillan Lequieu will select a handful of counties as case studies based on their participation in past surveys, including counties that have seen success and those who have struggled over time. She’ll ask questions like, "Why are you making these decisions about what to do with your limited funding?” “Why are you addressing certain problems, like the aftermath of COVID, in this specific way?”  

“Typically, qualitative and quantitative researchers’ projects aren't designed in such a way that we can work seamlessly together. But we are going to be able to answer new questions that have never been answered before by doing both a large-scale survey and in-depth qualitative research,” McMillan Lequieu said. 

Previous iterations of the survey have included the nearly identical questions every time it has been distributed, which allows Kelly and her collaborators to compare how responses have changed over 25 years and link them to federal or state-level policy changes. 

Through this survey, "We're going to be able to understand so much more about how local government leaders are navigating tricky financial contexts and different political administrations, and also how they're managing their constituents' expectations,” McMillan Lequieu explained.  

McMillan Lequieu is interested in comparing the successes and struggles of various counties in order to identify factors that make certain places more resilient to challenges than others, such as specific policies, ways of talking about place identity, ways of building community or ways of bringing in extra funds.  

With the results, McMillan Lequieu and Kelly will develop public-facing presentations and white papers designed to help policymakers on the county, state and federal levels make more informed decisions about how they're using funds and governing local communities. 

“I hope that this project will help decision makers at community levels see that they're not alone in the hard decisions they have to make,” she said. “...that they can see models that are working for some of their neighbors in similar contexts, and hopefully state and federal leaders will see how top-down budget decisions make a huge difference in the way that everyday people experience daily life. This is really applicable research.”