Risk Sensitivity and Hunter Perceptions of Chronic Wasting Disease Risk and Other Hunting, Wildlife, and Health Risks

ABSTRACT

This article examined relationships among hunter perceptions of personal health risks from chronic wasting disease (CWD), knowledge and information about CWD, and perceptions of other hunting, wildlife, and health risks. Data were obtained from surveys of 2,725 deer and elk hunters in Colorado. Cluster analysis grouped hunters into no (42%), slight (44%), and moderate (14%) risk groups based on perceptions of personal health risks from CWD (e.g., concern about health, become ill from CWD). There were minimal differences among groups in demographics, information sources, and knowledge about CWD. Hunters who perceived higher health risks from CWD (i.e., moderate risk), however, perceived greater risks associated with CWD to other humans, CWD to wildlife, hunting to personal health, other diseases to health, and the future of hunting. These findings illustrated the concept of risk sensitivity where hunters who perceived higher risks from CWD were predisposed to rate all other risks as large.

KEYWORDS:

• Chronic wasting disease
• hunting
• information sources
• knowledge
• perceived risk
• risk sensitivity

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the hunters in this study for their support by completing questionnaires. An Associate Editor and two external referees are thanked for helpful comments on this article. An earlier version was presented at the Third International Chronic Wasting Disease Symposium in Park City, Utah.

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding from Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Notes

1. Responses were examined for differences among these four strata. In total, 42% of the tests for differences among these strata for all of the questionnaire items examined in this article were not statistically significant and 58% were significant, but tests of significance are sensitive to the large sample sizes here (Vaske, 2008). There were also no clear patterns in any of these differences. In addition, Cramer’s V and eta (η) effect size statistics ranged from only .01 to .21, averaged only .08, and were ≤.15 for 86% of these tests. Using guidelines from Cohen (1988) and Vaske (2008) for interpreting effect sizes, these values suggested the magnitude of almost all differences among the strata was “small” or “minimal,” respectively. Weights were calculated as: Weight = Population %/Sample %, where Population % = hunters in stratum/hunters in state, and Sample % = respondents in stratum/respondents in state. The weight for resident deer hunters, for example, was 0.847 (46,559 deer hunters in stratum /222,862 hunters in state)/(672 respondents in stratum/2,725 respondents in state).

2. Sjöberg (2000a, 2000b) suggested that risk sensitivity could possibly be an artifact of people implementing satisficing scale use habits where they always respond either on the high or low ends of scales, no matter what is being considered (i.e., straight-lining). Correlations between these scales measuring risk perceptions and the other scales immediately preceding (r = .04–.18, average = .10) and following (r = .01–.22, average = .14) these risk scales in the questionnaires, however, showed only “small” (Cohen, 1988) or “minimal” (Vaske, 2008) relationships, suggesting that only scale use habits do not explain the findings in this article.

3. Principal components exploratory factor analyses (EFA) with both oblique and varimax rotations on all four CWD health risk variables and the 33 other risk items consistently produced separate factors reflecting the identical categories in this article (e.g., risks of CWD to health, CWD to other humans, CWD to wildlife, hunting to health, other diseases to health) and all loadings were ≥.40. In addition, a single EFA of all these risk variables without rotation and with the number of factors fixed to one showed that the factor explained only 25% of the variance. These approaches represent Harman single factor tests (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003) and suggest that common method variance or bias was generally absent.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding from Colorado Parks and Wildlife.