Developing young people's sense of self and place through sport

Previous research has recognized positive health implications, both physical and mental, as an outcome of participation in leisure pursuits. They provide opportunities for self-expression and stress reduction, as well as an environment in which people can socialize. Leisure activities, specifically sport activities, can play a significant role in young people's identity development. This paper explores the leisure activities in which young people in Adelaide, Australia participate. It examines the role of leisure activities in terms of young people's identity and feelings towards their hometown. This study consisted of semi-structured focus groups conducted with 24 senior high school students, followed by a survey resulting in 226 useable responses. Respondents were aged between 16 and 18 years of age. From the range of activities identified and explored, the results revealed sports activities to have the greatest impact on young people's lives. The results demonstrated that frequency of participation has a significant effect on young people's involvement levels and how they identify with the activity

Human Dimensions of Widllife

This chapter briefly discusses a descriptive typology of attitudes towards wildlife that was quite influential in the pioneering years of research on human dimensions of wildlife. It describes a more recent theory‐driven approach to understanding human relationships with wildlife, guided by the cognitive hierarchy. The theory of cognitive hierarchy stresses that individual behaviour is guided by a hierarchy of interrelated cognitions including values, value orientations, attitudes and norms, and behavioural intentions. Studies using the wildlife value orientation scales suggest that domination orientations are deeply engrained in the cultural transmission process and endure over generations. The usefulness of studying wildlife value orientations depends on the concept's predictive validity. The cognitive hierarchy does not explicitly consider emotions. The concepts and measurements may reflect emotional content, but they are not intended to directly capture emotional dispositions or responses. Future research on human dimensions of wildlife may benefit from the study of both cognitive and emotional responses to wildlife.Environmental PsychologyEnvironmental Psychology: An Introduction, Second Edition<br/

The Representation of Human-Environment Interactions in Land Change Research and Modelling

Land change is the result of multiple human-environment interactions operating across different scales. Land change research needs to account for processes ranging from global trade of food and energy to the local management of land resources at farm and landscape level. Land change has a pronounced impact on the local and global environment. Land change may cause degradation of the living environment through soil degradation or changes in the aesthetic qualities of the landscape. At the same time, land change may lead to aggregate impacts on larger spatial and temporal scales, examples include the impacts on global climate and food security. Such impacts affect human well-being and often feedback on land use practices and decision making by adapting to the changing environmental and socio-economic context. Human-environment interactions in the land system are, therefore, connected across scales with multiple feedbacks, leading to so-called 'teleconnections' or 'telecoupling' in the earth system. The same process may cause different trajectories of land change in different world regions: globalization of food production can cause deforestation in tropical regions while marginal agricultural landscapes in other regions are abandoned. The local environmental and socio-economic context determines how the same global changes lead to different trajectories of land change in different parts of the world

Understanding the cognitive basis for human-wildlife relationships as a key to successful protected-area management

Wildlife is a critical component of protected areas worldwide. It can serve not only as a primary attraction or an enjoyable part of the visitor experience but also as a source of conflict. Managing wildlife in this context requires a broadbased approach that can account for the myriad factors underlying conservation effectiveness, including the nature of people's relationships with wildlife. These relationships stem from the cognitive foundation that shapes human behavior toward wildlife. Our theory of wildlife value orientations contends that, at an individual level, broad cultural ideals or value orientations form the basis for more specific cognitions that in turn drive individual action. We extend this cognitive hierarchy framework to account for the role of societal forces that give rise to cultural values and their orientations over time. Using empirical data from two cases, we surview this micro-macro approach and explore its implications for protected-area management. First, data from a nineteen-state study conducted in 2004 via mail survey in the United States show how two contrasting orientations—domination and mutualism—produce different attitudes and behaviors toward wildlife. Hierarchical linear modeling of these data supports a societal-level shift from domination to mutualism in response to modernization. Second, a 2007-8 exploratory application of our approach in ten European countries provides further evidence of the role of value orientations in shaping individual response to wildlife issues. Together, these studies highlight the importance of multilevel models for exploring the social aspects of wildlife and protected-area management