Social Structure, Identities, and Values: A Network Approach to Understanding People's Relationships to Forests

Abstract

A social network approach is employed to examine the role that social capital plays in the relationships people have with forested landscapes and to identify the implications of these relationships to forest land-use planning. We argue that network-based processes lead to the development of social identity and to the formation of forest values. By linking the individual level of analysis to expressive outcomes, the relationship between network range, identity diversity, and diversity of forest values is explored. Results suggest that network range is directly related to identity diversity, which mediates the relationship between network range and forest value diversity, and that strong ties are relatively more important than weak ties in explaining the formation of identity and forest value diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Social networks
• forest values
• forest land-use planning
• forest value formation
• outdoor recreation