Arrangement of the collection is by series: Rough Draft Materials; Articles and Reports; Correspondence; Questionnaires, Tabulations, and Code sheets; Pine Mountain School; Miscellaneous Maps and Papers; Follow-up Study.   The finding aid was updated in March 2015.

The study was proposed in 1949 by Berea College president, Francis S. Hutchins, then a trustee of Pine Mountain Settlement School. The school's boarding high school had closed that year and elementary programs merged with the Harlan County school system. It was concluded that a socio-economic study of the area would be useful in identifying possible new areas of service for the school to pursue.  Giffin's study was never published in its entirety, though he did use data from the study to write several articles, three of which were published as a series in Mountain Life and Work in 1953.  Giffin apparently based the design of his study upon one utilized by the University of Kentucky Department of Rural Sociology in a 1949 survey of farm families by U.K. professors, Ward W. Bauder and James S. Brown.

Giffin, Roscoe Raymond.

Berea College
Education -- Kentucky -- Harlan County
Giffin, Roscoe Raymond -- 1914-1962
Pine Mountain Settlement School (Pine Mountain, Ky.).
Rural schools -- Kentucky -- History.