A WSU sociology professor is publishing her observations about poverty after spending a year in an isolated, rural community.

Jennifer Sherman, an assistant professor at WSU Tri-Cities, said her book “Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America” is the outcome of her fieldwork between 2003 and 2004 in northern California. “This was a former logging community,” she said.

The area known as Golden Valley suffered an economic downturn after the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990. This listing meant that logging jobs were discontinued, as the trees were preserved for the birds.

When she started her study, Sherman was a student at UC Berkeley. She first commuted back and forth but ended up living in the community.

She said her decision to move helped her discover many new things about the people.

“Being immersed meant I learned so many things,” Sherman said.

The book focuses on how massive job loss affects things like family life and gender roles, she said.

“The question is what is the acceptable way to fight poverty in these communities,” Sherman said.

In the book, Sherman also looks at how the loss of timber industry jobs affects issues such as substance abuse and domestic violence. The book is a combination of personal observation, surveys and in-depth interviews.

Sherman is a poverty scholar, she said. Rural communities are seeing economic downturns just as much as urban ones, she said.

“No matter where, rural communities are seeing the same set of economic changes,” she said.

Sherman said she has been studying family structures in urban, single-parent families among the poor. Many single parents in urban communities are just not getting married. This is not the case among rural communities, she said.

“There is a rising number of single parents because of divorce, not because of the decision to not get married,” Sherman said.

Sherman came to WSU Tri-Cities in 2008 to be a professor after graduating with a doctorate in 2006 from UC Berkeley.

The book was first published in October and is on sale now.