Rural forested community shocks as perceived by in-migrants versus long-term residents

Rural communities face challenges and opportunities through changing relationships to natural resources that they depend on socially and culturally. Structural shifts in community-natural resource interactions may be expressed as “shocks”, or disruptions that create community change across multiple scales. These shocks may be isolated or connected events, and frequently have associated ripple effects. Our objectives were to (1) identify community shocks based on local resident perspectives, (2) evaluate regional variability of resident-perceived shock events, and (3) assess variation in perceptions of shocks between newer in-migrant and long-term residents. We used a mail survey to collect data from residents in rural New York, Ohio, Maine, and West Virginia (USA). Rather than starting with designated perspectives from past research, we used an inductive approach to identify shock events and their impacts. Categories of major shock events included, but were not limited to, employment loss, land transfers and designations, infrastructure development, loss of institutions, and natural disasters. Each community's history, shocks, and outcomes were uniquely place-dependent. Shocks identified and perception of them varied by residential tenure. Although identified similarly in a general sense by all respondents, details about individual shocks were more elaborately described by long-term residents, and in-migrants conveyed awareness of historical shocks. Conceptualizations of discrete, identifiable, and individual “shock” events are too simple and narrow for elucidating ongoing community perturbations that accumulate, counteract, and influence each other.