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Canadian rural sociologists have given very little attention to the status reports and reviews that poses a question of whether there should be a rural sociology at all. It is indeed confirmed that there are few reviews on the development and status of Canadian sociology that appeared in the literature. In this article, the authors present some existing data on the status of Canadian rural research activity. Findings from two surveys of social scientists provided the authors an estimate of the extent of the existence of rural sociology in Canada. The first work cited is a survey conducted by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Associations. In this survey, main method for data gathering is through sending questionnaires to the members of the association. This questionnaires are geared to come up with a preliminary estimate of the number of real rural sociologists in the country. The next study that provided another perspective on rural sociology is the preliminary findings of the Science Council of Canada Study Group on Agricultural Research. In the research cited by the authors, it was found that rural sociology is the most neglected of all the disciplines in the agricultural research in Canada. With the study cited by the authors of this article, they came up with several reasons that may have contributed to the lack of interest of sociologists in rural sociology in Canada.

The concept of familism suggested certain questions to be asked about 160 Saskatchewan farm families, in which the mothers were interviewed in 1953. The goal was to detect possible changes in the familistic pattern which had been assumed to be more characteristic of pioneer days. Rough measures were developed for six aspects. No consistent pattern of interrelationship was revealed among the measured aspects. Grain-farm families ranked high on integration. The relatively prosperous families were the ones most interested in continuity on the land. The younger families displayed division of labor that was most sex- and age-related. These are examples of tentative conclusions. The question is raised, whether a situation is emerging which is actually more favorable to certain of the familistic aspects than was the pioneer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]