| Summary: | In 2010 an interdisciplinary team of social and natural scientists began a project to study society–environment interactions in northeast Oregon. At first, the Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) project focused on Baker, Union and Wallowa Counties. Subsequently the project's scope expanded to cover Crook, Grant, Umatilla and Wheeler Counties. One part of the CAFOR research involved a series of telephone surveys carried out in four stages over 2011 to 2018. The surveys employed consistent methods with landline or cell telephone interviews of independent random samples conducted by trained personnel from the Survey Center of the University of New Hampshire. Questions covered a range of topics related to environment and community change. Some questions were repeated with identical wording on two, three or four surveys, watching for continuity and change in public opinion. The survey design involved stratification with oversampling of smaller-population counties, and in some cases also of forest landowners. To adjust for both design and response bias, probability weights (inverse of the probability of selection) are applied for all graphs and statistical analyses in this paper. Effects of this weighting on variables of interest here are not large, but make the results more representative with respect to county populations and age/sex distributions. Geographic coverage varied across the four surveys. The initial stage in 2011 sampled residents from three counties: Baker, Union and Wallowa. Subsequently, the 2014 and 2015 surveys expanded to seven contiguous counties, including those three. The project's final survey in 2018 refocused on the original three. A total of 5,085 interviews had been conducted, 3,782 of them involving residents of Baker, Union or Wallowa County. To maintain comparability, our analysis in this dataset concerns only that three-county subset, although findings remain broadly similar in analyses using the complete seven-county dataset. The Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) ...
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