(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Confidence, community & conservation: Exploring the relationship between self-efficacy and experience in female hunters [1]

[]

Date: 2022-12-01

Hunting is, and has been, an activity with stark gender disparities in the U.S. While other sports and recreational activities have seen dramatic progress towards gender parity in recent decades, female hunters still only make up 10% of the current hunting population (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). However, while the overall hunting population has been declining since the early 1990s (Enck, Decker, & Brown, 2000; Gigliotti & Metcalf, 2016), the number of females who hunt has been growing (McFarlane, Watson, & Boxall, 2003; Metcalf, Graefe, Trauntvein, & Burns, 2015).

Despite recent efforts among wildlife, natural resource, and recreation managers to promote an increase in representation of women1 as well as ethnic and racial minorities in outdoor spaces, including hunting, much remains to be done (USFWS, 2016; Stodolska, Shinew, & Camarillo, 2020; Schultz et al., 2019; Hicks, Mirza, Rice, Richards, & Alarab, 2020; Flores, Falco, Roberts, & Valenzuela, 2018). In 2016, of the 11.5 million people aged 16 and over who hunted in the U.S., 10.3 million were male and 1.1 million were female, representing 8 percent and 1 percent of males and females, respectively, of the overall population. According to the 2016 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, of those who hunted, 97 percent (11.1 million) were white and the remaining 3 percent were Asian, African American, or classified as “Other.”

Understanding recreation equity as well as the social barriers for groups who are underrepresented in outdoor recreation has been of increasing concern and interest among scholars (Krymkowski, Manning, & Valliere, 2014; Metcalf, Burns, & Graefe, 2013; Shinew et al., 2006; Stodolska, 2015). Well-established in the outdoor recreation and leisure literatures is the influence of socialization, social relationships and social networks on outdoor recreation participation (Field & O'leary, 1973; Stokowski, 1990; Heywood, 1987; Flores & Kuhn, 2018). Social dynamics in outdoor recreation communities can contribute to subtle, yet influential perceptions of discrimination, which may be expressed as not feeling part of a community of recreationists (Byrne, 2012; Roberts & Rodriguez, 2008), or not feeling as though one belongs in a place or among a group (Kloek, Buijs, Boersema, & Schouten, 2017).

Persistent gender norms exist in both the participation and representation of women in outdoor recreation (Godtman King et al., 2020). Despite women's participation in outdoor recreation increasing in Western societies, it is evident that women continue to be underrepresented and tend to be portrayed in conventional roles in popular media (Collins, 2011) rooted in normative discourses around beauty, motherhood, and care in leisure (Kinnaird & Hall, 1994; Wearing, 1998). By providing less visibility and fewer outdoor role models to women, media and marketing reflects, perpetuates, and further generates deeply held gender norms in our society (Godtman Kling, Margaryan, & Fuchs, 2020).

For women hunters, being starkly outnumbered by men and simultaneously underrepresented in media present social barriers to participation. As scholars of self-efficacy and social belonging have found (Hays, Thomas, Maynard, & Bawden, 2009, 2010, pp. 373–392; Loucks-Atkinson & Mannell, 2007; Vealey, Hayashi, Garner-Holman, & Giacobbi, 1998), and many people know through experience, it takes a lot of inner fortitude to persist in a space where people look at you with surprise as if to say, “What are you doing here?” As Mary Zeiss Stange writes in her essay, “Women and Hunting in the West”:

"Given the patriarchal social structures that shaped American society, those women who did venture afield, whether with the men in their lives or with other women, were more often than not judged by most of their peers to be displaying 'eccentricity of conduct” (Stange, 2005, n.p.).

Today, while women remain the “odd ones out” within the U.S. hunting population, recent increases in license purchases by women (USFW 2020) and discussions across popular media sources suggest that women hunters are an active and growing community (Levin, 2020; Mahoney, 2020). This demographic shift among U.S. hunters is an area ripe for academic inquiry and scholarship. Specifically, given that hunter education, skills training programs, and outreach materials have been designed and developed within a context of a predominately male audience, there is a need to build on existing scholarship related to hunter recruitment, retention, and reactivation (i.e., “R3”) (e.g., Enck et al., 2000; Larson, Stedman, Decker, Siemer, & Baumer, 2014; Ryan & Shaw, 2011; Vayer et al., 2021), with a focus on the needs of women hunters across their lifespan. This paper aims to begin that conversation.

We build off the work of Metcalf et al. (2015), who identified social support as a distinct component of self-efficacy contributing to females’ ability to negotiate through constraints to hunting participation. Social support can be defined as confidence derived through camaraderie, meaningful interpersonal connection, and the feeling of belonging when pursuing an activity or challenge (Prokopy, Floress, Klotthor-Weinkauf, & Baumgart-Getz, 2008; 1997; Vealey et al., 1998). Literature regarding hunting and social dynamics has shown that social support is an important predictor of whether or not individuals are more likely to be motivated to hunt or to continue to hunt in the future (Enck et al., 2000; Hrubes, Ajzen, & Daigle, 2001; Stedman, 2012; Voorhees, 2007). These findings are consistent with broader scholarship on leisure participation and constraints (Godbey, Crawford, & Shen, 2010; Sharaievska, Stodolska, & Floyd, 2014; Stodolska et al. 2020; White, 2008). Social support contributes positively to hunter participation, both directly and indirectly by providing opportunities for hunters to learn skills from one another, access new hunting areas, and build camaraderie through sharing and eating wild game (Enck et al., 2000; Voorhees, 2007).

Along with social support, self-efficacy is comprised of an individual's ability to develop and use skills to perform an activity (Bandura, 1997). Hunting is unique in that experiences, and subsequently skills, are gained slowly due to the limited opportunities each year for formative learning to happen. Unlike other activities where one can practice every day, hunters cannot harvest an animal each day and may endure long periods of time without even seeing harvestable animals. Moreover, hunting involves not only physical skill, but also psychological and ethical components that take years to acquire and hone.

We are interested in understanding how self-efficacy changes over the course of a female hunters’ lifetime as she gains experience. In the existing literature, hunting participation is often measured by whether individual hunters participate in a given year based on license sales data (Heberlein, Serup, & Ericsson, 2008; Larson et al., 2014; McFarlane et al., 2003; Winkler & Warnke, 2013). While this method is important to understand participation trends, license sales data do not provide information on the experience level of individual hunters. In this research, we were able to ask hunters how many years of experience they had to understand how self-efficacy, an antecedent factor to participation, differs as women advance as hunters. By better understanding the role of skills and social support in bolstering self-efficacy among female hunters, we aim to help mangers improve recruitment and retention efforts and expand our understanding of self-efficacy theory in outdoor recreation more broadly.

Hunting is deeply rooted in cultures across the globe and has been foundational to our existence as humans; it has served as a means for people to harvest wild food for sustenance and played an integral role in shaping our relationship to land and the non-human natural world (i.e., wildlife) since time immemorial. While big-game hunting today is a male-biased behavior, this gendered pattern is not an ancestral one (Haas et al., 2020; Mahoney, 2020). From 12,000 year-old cave paintings that depict women in active roles in hunting and the existence of female hunting deities (perhaps the most famous being the Greek Artemis, also known as the Roman Diana) in early polytheistic religions across the globe to the persistence of ancestral hunting practices among Indigenous women today, women's engagement in hunting represents diverse and meaningful traditions (Mahoney, 2020). As our relationship with nature and hunting has changed with the rise of Western “civilization,” patriarchal societies, and the industrialization of food, gender roles have changed, too. In the U.S., the role of hunting has shifted from a necessary means of survival to an activity of choice, and often a form of outdoor recreation or sport. Understanding hunting participation has become more complex; motivations are diverse and interconnected. In recent history, the legacy of women in hunting in the U.S. found renewed expression in the 1990s, when the number of female hunters in the country roughly doubled to two million, and women went from representing three percent of the total hunting population to over ten percent (Fitzgerald, 2005). Some argue this surge was due in part to the release of rifle models in the 80s designed specifically for the female customer – one with an increasing amount of disposable income (Stange, Mary Zeiss; Oyster, 2000). The upward trend in female participation in hunting has prompted attention from managers in light of the well-documented benefits of hunting for wildlife conservation and natural resource management in the U.S. Specifically, hunting has implications for conservation agencies that receive a large portion of their budget from license sales revenue (McFarlane et al., 2003; Poudyal, Cho, & Bowker, 2008; Winkler & Warnke, 2013). Today, license fees and excise taxes on guns, ammunition and fishing equipment provide about 60% of the funding for state wildlife agencies, which manage most of the wildlife in the U.S. Given the recent decline in hunters in the U.S. of nearly 2 million in just the five year period between the 2011 and 2016 (according to the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation) (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Census Bureau, 2016), it is no surprise that there has been increased interest in recruiting and retaining female hunters, a growing constituent of the population. For example, there have been efforts dedicated to providing women with spaces to learn and share hunting skills and experiences (e.g., Artemis Sportswomen, Becoming an Outdoors Woman, Women on the Wing, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers women's-specific programming, First Hunt Foundation women's-specific programming). Recent research exploring the specific needs and experiences of women hunters has found that participation in hunting is motivated by different factors and mediated by different variables compared to their male counterparts (Gigliotti & Metcalf, 2016; Metcalf et al., 2015). Gigliotti and Metcalf (2016) found that the food provisioning aspect of hunting motivates women more than men. Metcalf et al. (2015) also found that the ‘family-oriented’ hunter, who views hunting as a family activity rather than an individual one, reported the highest constraint levels to hunting (for reasons such as the added responsibilities involved with organizing gear, food, transportation, for more people) as well as the highest propensity to utilize negotiation strategies to hunt (e.g., sharing equipment and skill building among family members). Not only do hunter identity divisions exist in terms of gender, but there are axes of differentiation among hunters rooted in values and motivations across demographic divisions (Essen, Heijgen, & Gieser, 2019). In recent decades, researchers have asked questions around what constitutes hunter identities in relation to one another, resolving to answer this question in terms of specialization, group identification and attribution theories (Essen et al. 2019; Kerr & Abel, 2016; Needham & Vaske, 2013). While women hunt for a diverse number of reasons (as do men), research shows that there is also ‘unity in diversity’ underlying females’ motivations to hunt today. For example, a study by Gigliotti and Metcalf (2016) measured hunter motivations and gender differences with eight years of survey data of South Dakota Black Hills deer hunters (2001–2007, and 2010). Overall, females and males had similar rankings across eight motivations (social, nature, excitement, meat, challenge, trophy, extra hunting opportunity, and solitude). However, the most notable difference between female and male hunters was the significantly higher selection of “meat” by females as their most important motivation for hunting compared to males (22% vs. 7% respectively). Additionally, females rated the social reasons for liking hunting as significantly more important (Gigliotti & Metcalf, 2016). In this paper, we focus on women hunters and the underlying social and psychological factors contributing to their participation in hunting. By investigating the important yet overlooked role of self-efficacy that mediates female participation in hunting, we aim to illuminate new areas of focus for female hunter recruitment and retention efforts that may benefit conservation and wildlife management.

While there is limited scholarship on self-efficacy in the context of hunting behavior (Covelli, 2011; Hrubes et al., 2001; Stedman, 2012), years of sport psychology research provide evidence that confidence is a key psychological factor differentiating successful and unsuccessful performance in a variety of sporting settings (Hays et al., 2009; Vealey, R. S., Hayashi, S.W., Garner-Holman, M., Giacobbi, 1998). Measuring self-efficacy is a social-cognitive approach to understanding and explaining behaviors, specifically behaviors associated with beliefs held by the individual (Bandura, 1977). Perceived self-efficacy can influence the effort used to overcome challenges or barriers (Bandura, 1977). According to Bandura (1986), “efficacy is theorized to influence motivation, effect, and consequently behavior” (in Loucks-Atkinson & Mannell, 2007, p. 20). Bandura proposed four main sources of self-efficacy—performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological states—that have been supported by both descriptive and experimental research (Cramp & Bray, 2011; Hays et al. 2009; Propst & Koesler, 1998; Schumann and Sibthorp, 2013; Taniguchi, Widmer, & Ricks, 2017). Other notable early research on this topic includes Vealey's (1986, 1998, 2001) work that expanded and reconceptualized Bandura's framework, providing evidence to support the reliability and validity of nine sources of self-confidence used by athletes when competing in sport that fall into three categories; 1) Achievement, which includes both mastery and demonstration of ability; 2) Self-Regulation, which includes physical and mental preparation and physical self-presentation and; 3) Climate, which includes factors such as sources of social support, mentorship, vicarious experience, and environmental comfort (Vealey, R. S., Hayashi, S.W., Garner-Holman, M., Giacobbi, 1998; Vealey, 1986). Much of the contemporary literature in sport psychology on the sources of self-confidence uses the theories and framework of Bandura (1986) and Vealey (1986). For example, more recent work by Hays et al. (2007, 2010, pp. 373–392) extends the work of Bandura and Vealey, demonstrating the multidimensional nature of confidence and the importance of utilizing a sport-specific framework to aid future research (Hays et al., 2009; Hays, Thomas, Maynard, & Butt, 2010, pp. 373–392). Here, we take a new approach, combining theories of self-efficacy from sport psychology to offer a different perspective for wildlife and hunting managers. Following Hays (2007, Hays et al., 2010, Hays et al., 2010, pp. 373–392), we acknowledge there are many different sources of confidence, which can be more or less important to overall self-efficacy in any given situation. However, for the purposes of this research we extend Bandura’s (1986, 1997) and Vealey’s (1986, Hays et al., 2010, Hays et al., 2010 frameworks and look specifically at two components of self-efficacy 1) skills-based efficacy: one's confidence in their skills related to the activity in question and 2) support-based efficacy: confidence that is derived through social support, camaraderie, and the feeling of belonging when pursuing an activity or challenge. Bandura asserted that self-efficacy is determined not only by the skills an individual may possess, but also their ability to use those skills in the moments when they are needed (Bandura, 1997). An example of skills-based efficacy is where a hunter may be confident about their technical ability to handle a rifle and shoot accurately while target practicing, but lack confidence in their ability to maintain accuracy in field conditions or when the crosshairs fall on a live animal rather than a paper target. The differing degrees of confidence across a range of skills and under a variety of conditions all impact overall self-efficacy beliefs. Support-based efficacy is when social support is integrated in to an individual's hunting “climate” through meaningful interpersonal connections (Vealey et al., 1998). For example, when hunters feel they have a social network of people they can share hunting stories, traditions, and ideas with. In this paper, we conceptualize social support as a distinct component of self-efficacy (Fig. 1). According to Bandura, self-efficacy can affect one's ability to overcome constraints, specifically intrapersonal constraints which may undermine recreation participation. Thus, in our conceptual model, we integrate the work of Loucks-Atkinson and Mannell (2007) and conceptualize self-efficacy as influencing—either increasing or decreasing—constraints a hunter experiences and their ability to overcome them through using negotiation strategies. Constraints are factors perceived or experienced by individuals that limit participation in recreation activities (Jackson, 1997) and have been researched particularly with regard to minority groups (Stodolska et al., 2020). For women hunters, existing research has shown that constraints are wide-ranging and can include structural factors such as childcare needs or a lack of training facilities to constraints such as a lack of hunting partners or a lack of skill (Metcalf et al., 2015). Constraints can be overcome using negotiation strategies, or ways individuals change their behavior to continue or increase their participation in activities (Jackson & Rucks, 1995). Negotiation strategies for women hunters include actions such as taking initiative to find partners to hunt with, fitting hunting in around other commitments, and budgeting money to be able to hunt more (Metcalf et al., 2015). Women who hunt have negotiated a number of constraints, and their ability to do so is related to self-efficacy, which we hypothesize as multidimensional and changing uniquely over time (Fig. 1) (Loucks-Atkinson & Mannell, 2007). For example, a hunter with higher self-efficacy may not be constrained by a lack of hunting partners or may be better equipped to negotiate that constraint. We predict that promoting participation in hunting requires more than equipping women with hunting skills (i.e., skills-based confidence), but also requires fostering social-cultural influences such as feelings of belonging, and of encouragement and confidence gained from friends, family, and hunting partners (i.e., support-based confidence). By focusing in on self-efficacy in this research, we hope to illuminate an invisible and intangible factor related to hunting participation that has been largely overlooked in the literature on hunting and other outdoor recreation activities.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2213078022000901

Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.