Small City vs. Medium City

Visiting Quartzsite, AZ was a fantastic experience where I got to meet real people, but as soon as I had exited the freeway to enter the city I knew I had made a choice, in choosing this location, that would skew my research.

Quartzsite, like I mentioned in an earlier post, is a town that people (for a majority of the year) travel through, not to. I want to stress that this is not an attempt to belittle the town or the purpose that it serves to the millions of people that drive through it in the course of a year, but it is small to the point that it is bound to have a number of trends that are anomalies. Or so I had assumed.

Aside from how religious the community may be, homogeneously or just an abundance of faith, they have the same worries as working class people from larger cities.
-Businesses are shutting down. People are losing jobs. How can they live if all they see are dead ends and already limited opportunities decreasing even more?
-Health Care. People get sick. Some businesses cannot afford staff because they cannot afford the health insurance they would have to pay them, on top of their salaries. So there are people that need work, businesses to need workers, but this issue is keeping that demand from being supplied. We need a comprehensive system that works for the American people, because people are not going to stop getting sick anytime soon.
-Change. People really care about their communities, especially in these smaller, tighter-knit cities and towns. This means they are cool with marginalizing a few if it means the status quo is kept and the majority are not forced to face change. A fear of change is directly linked with a fear of the unknown. What's going to happen if we, as a community, ______? There is no real way of knowing until it is actually implemented. This is why the public needs to be in the know, for misinformation can spread like wildfire in these small communities, and when that happens it is nearly impossible to shift the idea of what is the truth.

And many others.

I was thinking that interviews in a smaller city would not be good for this project and I would give them less thorough consideration, but that is what nearly everyone else has done. At all levels, except for local. So the local government has near unchecked reign because no government (state or federal) above them cares enough about their constituency--because the constituency's votes hardly affect the election of these higher up officials-- and these people are forgotten.
I need to consider these people. These people are also Americans, we may be different but that is what makes our collective whole better.
I have also been going to slightly larger cities, slightly-less-than-medium sized cities where I am beginning to meet people who say that phrase I have been eagerly waiting to hear "I've lived here all my life, born and raised." And yet, I hear similar issues. We have a lot more in common than you'd think, you just have to be willing to listen.