Exploring the Social Habitat for Hunting: Toward a Comprehensive Framework for Understanding Hunter Recruitment and Retention

Abstract

Decades of decline in the number of hunters in the United States have made hunter recruitment and retention (HRR) a high priority within the North American wildlife management community. Sociodemographic changes (e.g., urbanization, shifting racial/ethnic composition, parcelization of rural properties) suggest a need to re-examine conventional knowledge of HRR processes and develop insight that reflects contemporary contexts. In this article, we emphasize the “social habitat” for hunting and adopt a social–ecological model of hunting behavior to explore the myriad factors that interact to influence HRR at multiple scales. We examine the dynamic, hierarchical social structures that influence HRR, including forces that operate at the individual, micro (e.g., family), meso (e.g., community), and macro (e.g., society) levels. The review suggests that future research addressing HRR could expand to account for a broader, more diverse social habitat for hunting that includes these multiple scales.

• hunting
• recruitment
• retention
• social habitat
• social world