Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Award Date

2024

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department / School

Natural Resource Management

First Advisor

Jennifer Zavaleta Cheek

Abstract

Approximately 14.4 million people hunt in the United States, yet only 3.1 million (22%) of these hunters are women. To enhance women’s participation, many state natural resource agencies aim to reduce barriers and create pathways for women to hunt. Previously, researchers surveyed women to understand and describe barriers to their full participation in hunting. However, this methodology often just quantifies the different barriers without describing the interconnectedness and how the complexity of barriers can impact women’s participation in hunting. This thesis instead took an inductive research approach with the goal of better understanding women’s perspectives when faced with complex barriers. I also used a mixed methods approach by conducting a cultural salience analysis (n=50) to identify women’s decisions in order to hunt with semi-structured interviews (n=22) to elicit connections across decisions. The most frequently listed decisions included gear, household responsibilities, hunting partners, land access, and general preplanning. Given these decisions, managers could potentially increase recruitment and retention of female hunters by improving access to gear through gear libraries or drives and encouraging women to hunt through social media campaigns. Additionally, I further explored women’s decisions regarding appropriate clothing, focusing on state lawmakers’ initiative to include fluorescent pink as an alternative to blaze orange in hunter safety regulations. I conducted a content analysis of hunting regulation handouts from state agencies, online news articles, and state House or Senate bills, and I complemented this with a focus group with five experienced female hunters from hunting nonprofit organizations. The analysis revealed that state lawmakers did not appropriately define the policy problem and, therefore, missed an opportunity to address the underlying barriers facing women who want to hunt. State lawmakers did not adequately incorporate women’s perspectives as they designed this policy and its campaign messaging, which may have limited their goal of recruiting more women into hunting. Also, state lawmakers had hoped that promoting fluorescent pink would have encouraged more companies to create women’s clothes lines. State lawmakers could address barriers with alternative policies, including economically encouraging companies to produce women-specific gear, enhancing R3 programs to include mentorship opportunities, or increasing hunting land access through more public access programs.

Publisher

South Dakota State University

Additional Files
Jackson_WomenHunters_Freelist_Decisions.xlsx (32 kB)
This dataset includes information on how women make decisions to hunt, including their salience score and p value. The target population were women who had interest or experience or in hunting, specifically in South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. I used the free list question type to conduct a cultural salience analysis where I asked women to list the decisions women made in order to hunt (Quinlan 2005). I collected 50 lists and found 131 unique decisions. I analyzed the unique decisions and decision categories of salience value using the Smith and Borgatti 1997 equation. Due to the large number of unique decisions, I also followed Chaves et al. (2019) to determine the probability of a decisions’ salience statistic using a Monte Carlo method. I used this method to create an objective threshold to determine the high salient items, which helped determine the overall decision categories. This dataset is analyzed and described in a thesis from the Natural Resource Management Department at South Dakota State University (Jackson 2024).
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Rights Statement

In Copyright