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  • A Course on 'Our Patchwork Nation'

    By Joshua Kim October 25, 2010 9:00 pm EDT

    Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America, by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, is a book that reminds me why I got into the social science game to begin with. If I were still teaching sociology (and I miss teaching!), the next course I designed would be totally around Patchwork Nation.

    The idea of Patchwork Nation came out of Chinni's and Gimpel's frustration with the Red State / Blue State media divide. They thought that there had to be a more nuanced and accurate framework to understand elections, politics, economics and culture. Using a variety of data sources, they came up with a framework that includes 12 types of communities (with the county as the unit of analysis):

    • Boom Towns
    • Campus and Careers
    • Emptying Nests
    • Evangelical Epicenters
    • Immigration Nation
    • Industrial Metropolis
    • Military Bastions
    • Minority Central
    • Monied 'Burbs
    • Mormon Outposts
    • Service Worker Centers
    • Tractor Country

    You can check out what community type you live in at the Patchwork Nation website. www.patchworknation.org Where do you live? Does the description on the site (or in the book) of your county ring true to your experience?

    It would be interesting to filter IHE readers through this framework.

    Not surprisingly, I live in a "Campus and Careers" county , defined as "…cities and towns with young, educated populations; more secular and Democratic than other American communities". The representative community for Campus and Careers is Ann Arbor, MI.

    The combination of the book and the website provides all the material necessary for a great class. I think that the authors are willing to make part of the data they used to construct their analysis available to other researchers (and students) to analyze.

    Think about how much richer the Patchwork Nation framework would be if student researchers contributed new forms of analysis to the public educational commons.

    What are you reading?

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Comments on A Course on 'Our Patchwork Nation'

  • I don't think so....
  • Posted by Midwest Person on October 26, 2010 at 11:15am EDT
  • My county in Ohio is listed as a boom town. Hardly. We've had our home on the market for 18 months. No offers. The county is somewhere between "Campus and Careers" and "Tractor Country." We have a state university but we also produce lots of corn, wheat and soybeans.
  • Posted by Mike on October 26, 2010 at 5:30pm EDT
  • Thank you for your blog I enjoy reading your thoughts.
  • Actually, that experience fits for a Boom Town
  • Posted by Dante Chinni on October 27, 2010 at 9:00am EDT
  • Actually Midwest Person, you're experience fits pretty well. It is the "Boom Towns" that have been hammered by the housing mess -- think of, say, Clark County NV or Riverside CA, or Eagle CO, the place we examine in the book. And it's completely possible that one area of the county (the part where people live) has grown and changed in the last decade. Remember we are looking at populations, not square miles.

    If you'd like, you could tell me your specifics and I'd be happy to explain in more detail. You can email me at dantechinni@gmail.com.

    Thanks,
    Dante Chinni
  • Posted by Thomas on October 27, 2010 at 4:15pm EDT
  • Sociologists working in market research at Claritas have been doing this type of analysis for decades:

    http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp

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