Hua Qin

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Division of Applied Social Sciences

Environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources have become two established research areas in the United States with distinct institutional origins, research themes, and theoretical roots, as well as associated professional networks, journals, and conferences. Existing discussions of the relationships between the two subdisciplines a...

The relationships between risk perception and related behavior form a fundamental theme in risk analysis. Despite increasing attentions on the temporal dimension of risk perception and behavior in recent literature, the dynamic relationships between these two constructs remain understudied. Infectious disease outbreaks, such as the Coronavirus Dise...

As residents living in hazard‐prone areas face on‐going environmental threats, the actions they take to mitigate such risks are likely motivated by various factors. Whereas risk perception has been considered a key determinant of related behavioral responses, little is known about how risk mitigation actions influence subsequent perceived risk. In...

Research on societal–environmental interactions has gained increasing currency in China during the past several decades. Unlike relevant fields of study in the United States, environmentally oriented sociological research in China has not evolved into two separate subdisciplines—environmental sociology (ES) and natural resource sociology (NRS). How...

Twenty years after the organized sessions on environmental sociology (ES) and natural resource sociology (NRS) at the 2000 International Symposium on Society and Resource Management, a featured collection on environmental and resource sociology came out in Society and Natural Resources. The four commentaries included in the special section provide...

Existing literature on the intersection of environmental sociology (ES) and natural resource sociology (NRS) suggests that a better understanding of the diverse perceptions, experiences, and practices of individual researchers in these subfields are informative in understanding the trajectory of environmental and natural resource sociologies includ...

Through the lens of interactional field theory, we examine what has been learned about community dynamics, particularly community-oriented action and its relationship with community satisfaction, quality of life, and wellbeing. We first discuss eight previously unpublished analyses of community-oriented action and wellbeing in various forms. Then,...

Longitudinal studies of risk perception, while growing, remain an understudied area of risk analysis research. Natural resource-based communities provide a key backdrop for analyzing dynamic risk perceptions and related social-ecological processes. Since the mid-1990s, a mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak has affected roughly 3.4 million acres of...

In the originally published version of this manuscript, endnote 1 erroneously read “Quantitative findings of the 2017–2018 restudy are published elsewhere (Vickery et al. 2020).” This should have read “Qualitative findings of the 2017–2018 restudy are published elsewhere (Vickery et al. 2020).” This has now been corrected online.

Purpose of Review Outbreaks of tree-killing bark beetles have reached unprecedented levels in conifer forests in the northern hemisphere and are expected to further intensify due to climate change. In parts of Europe, bark beetle outbreaks and efforts to manage them have even triggered social unrests and political instability. These events have inc...

Forest disturbances caused by insects, pathogens, and fire continue to increasingly occur within forests across the United States and around the world. Given the dynamic nature of these forest disturbances and the role played by local residents in risk management, it is valuable to explore how the human experience, attitudes, and behaviors associat...

The frequencies and magnitudes of hazards and associated risks in modern society can be exacerbated by globalization and environmental change at local, regional, and global levels. Risk perception and related behavior constitute a fundamental theme in risk analysis. Despite the inherent dynamic nature of risk events, the temporal dimension of risk...

The United States has been affected by an extensive novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak since March 2020. On March 9, 2020 we started an online survey of people’s perceptions and behaviors related to this issue in Missouri and adjacent states (Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas). The survey was administered using Qualtrics and mainly distribute...

The United States have been affected by an extensive novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak since March 2020. On March 9, 2020 we started an online survey of people’s perceptions and behaviors related to this issue in Missouri and adjacent states (Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas). The survey was administered using Qualtrics and mainly distribut...

Evropské lesy poskytovaly lidské společnosti po staletí mnohé ekosystémové služby a generovaly značné ekonomické hodnoty. Některé z těchto benefitů jsou stále více ohrožovány změnou klimatu, která znásobuje vliv různých disturbančních činitelů, jako jsou např. kůrovci. Zranitelnost evropských lesů nepříznivě ovlivnil i jejich dlouhodobý management....

Although access to health care does not fully determine all health outcomes, inequalities observed in access can in turn affect health outcomes. Discrepancies observed in healthcare access among Hispanics in the US have been studied for over six decades (R. Andersen, Lewis, Giachello, Aday, & Chiu, 1981; R. M. Andersen, Giachello, & Aday, 1986; Bal...

The Special Issue Community, Natural Resources, and Sustainability seeks to engage in an interdisciplinary and international dialogue on the interrelationships of society, natural resources, and sustainability at the community level. In addition to introducing the twelve research articles published in this collection, we provide an overview of the...

Agriculture is an essential component of food security, sustainable livelihoods, and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Smallholder farmers, however, are restricted in the number of crops they can grow due to small plot sizes. Agriculture inputs, such as fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides, and improved seed varieties, could prove...

A growing body of work exists on the social implications of forest insect disturbances. However, although increasingly explored, there remains a need to further understand social responses to large-scale forest insect disturbances over time. This requires longitudinal investigations into people’s conceptualizations of their changing local environme...

A meta-study of 83 articles published from 1981 to 2016 was conducted on Hispanics access to health care in the US. Few of these studies have included acculturation and even fewer the role of social capital as important factors that impact health-care access for this population. Among those that do include these two factors, there is confusion as t...

This report describes changes in community reactions to the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreak and resulting changes in north central Colorado forests. In 2006, a project was initiated to assess community responses to forest disturbance by mountain pine beetles. The nine communities included in the study were Breckenridge, Fris...

Europe’s forests have provided human societies with essential ecosystem services and great economic values for centuries. Some of these values are now increasingly threatened by climate change, which greatly intensifies forest disturbances such as bark beetle outbreaks. However, some past management practices have also increased the vulnerability o...

Large-scale village relocation and urbanization, one of the most significant social changes in China, bring villages both development opportunities and social risks. The social risks mainly stem from the government’s strong position in land expropriation and policy preference for urban development. We observe the amalgamation of Anyang and Bomu Vil...

Mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks bear attributions at multiple scales, from the practices of local extractive industries to state and federal forest management to global climate change. Since 1996, an outbreak of MPB has swept across nearly 3.4 million acres in northcentral Colorado. The area affected is constituted by a heterogeneous group of...

Abstract: Post-reform China has witnessed a great volume of rural-urban migration, especially in the 21st century. Many migrant workers are parents though only about one-third of them have their children with them. In this chapter, we examine a collection of 32 solicited migrant workers’ letters home that contain relevant information about migrant...

Agriculture-led economic development, an important policy driver in sub-Saharan Africa, requires both agricultural intensification and environmentally sustainable resource management. Sustainable Intensification (SI) provides a mechanism for achieving both. However, SI within an SSA context has yet to be widely examined in the scholarly literature;...

Development is contentious in high-amenity rural areas experiencing migration-driven population growth. While some residents welcome the associated economic, demographic, and social changes, others resist these changes. Using survey data, we examine the predictors of views on amenity-led development in rural recreation counties across the United St...

Adopting drought tolerant plants (DTPs) to conserve water is a potential adaptation to the predicted effects of climate change in the Midwest. Survey responses from 624 Missouri households were analyzed using a univariate probit model. DTP adoption was positively correlated with both low and high household incomes, living in rural subdivisions, tim...

A full-text view-only version of the paper is available at: http://rdcu.be/oN86.

The sociology of natural resources and the environment constitutes a major field of inquiry in the research on human–environmental interactions. A constructive debate and dialogue on the relationships between environmental sociology (ES) and the sociology of natural resources (SNR) began at the 2000 International Symposium on Society and Resource M...

Community surveys have been widely used to investigate local residents’ perceptions and behaviors related to natural resource issues. However, most existing community survey research relies on cross-sectional data and is thus unable to capture the temporal dynamics of community processes. Longitudinal analysis has received increasing interest in re...

Local sociocultural processes including community perceptions and actions represent the most visible social impacts of various economic and environmental changes. Comparative community analysis has been used to examine diverse community perspectives on a variety of socioeconomic and environmental issues. However, as the temporal dimension of commun...

Community development and related approaches have become prominent in academic circles, resulting in the emergence and resurgence of related community-level notions. With the expansion of terms, conceptual confusions have surfaced. The notion of community resilience has gone through this process, as its development/understanding is still in progres...

Cities are perhaps one of the most challenging and yet enabling arenas for sustainable development goals. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the need to monitor each goal through objective targets and indicators based on common denominators in the ability of countries to collect and maintain relevant standardized data. While this ap...

The relationships between migration and agriculture represent a key aspect of rural restructuring in China and many other developing countries. Previous research largely generated mixed and incomplete findings on the effects of rural out-migration on agricultural change. Meta-analysis is considered as an important research strategy for comparing an...

In light of the rapid urbanization of the world’s population over the past decades, there is a growing concern about the environmental impacts of urban population growth. Rural–urban migration is a particularly important component of the urbanization process in developing countries and is often considered to be detrimental to urban environmental co...

Rural, high-amenity areas in the USA continue to attract significant numbers of migrants. A common approach to investigating the potential consequences of rural in-migration is to contrast the characteristics, attitudes, and/or actions of migrants and non-migrants (or “newcomers” and “oldtimers”). However, no consensus exists on the distinctions (o...

Many parts of rural America have experienced various types of reverse migration flows from urban areas since the 1970s. Recent rural in-migration is increasingly driven by people seeking natural amenities, and tends to concentrate in traditional natural resource-based communities or wildland–urban interface areas. These communities are often at ris...

A rapidly growing literature on the human dimensions of forest disturbance by insects has emerged over the past decade. As a result, the diverse social and economic impacts of forest disturbances and their implications have become increasingly understood. However, little research has assessed the temporal dynamics of community experience, perceptio...

Meta-analyses are studies that bring together data or results from multiple independent studies to produce new and over-arching findings. Current data curation systems only partially support meta-analytic research. Some important meta-analytic tasks, such as the selection of relevant studies for review and the integration of research datasets or fi...

This article presents a conceptual framework linking perspectives from migration and environment with rural livelihoods and interactional community research in the context of rural out-migration and environmental changes in developing countries. Household livelihoods and community interaction comprise two core mediating factors between rural out-mi...

Migration process has become increasingly important in recent research on population and the environment. A majority of the existing migration and environment literature has focused on the environmental causes and determinants of migration. With the largest rural-to-urban migration flow in world history, and growing concerns about the environmental...

Research on urban vulnerability has grown considerably during recent years, yet consists primarily of case studies based on conflicting theories and paradigms. Assessing urban vulnerability is also generally considered to be context-dependent. We argue, however, that it is possible to identify some common patterns of vulnerability across urban cent...

Recent migration and environment literature shows an increasing demand for better understanding the mechanisms through which human migration affects the natural environment. Community interaction can be an important mediating variable in the relationship between migration and the environment. This study investigates the impacts of rural-to-urban la...

Two opposing intellectual traditions and their contemporary developments regarding the relations among population, available resources, and quality of life as reflected in economic growth are reviewed. What is at issue is whether population growth is detrimental to or beneficial for economic development. Neither of the extreme views gives a complet...

An international workshop on “Heath Impacts of Air Quality and Climate Change in Asia” was held at Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, China, 9-11 April 2012. Air quality has been of increasing concern in Asia due to very rapid economic growth and urbanization. Due to the impacts of regional air pollution on human health, and the awareness that cli...

Disturbances by insects have considerable effect on the heterogeneity of forested landscapes in North America. Responding to calls for bringing human dimensions of landscape disturbance and heterogeneity into ecological assessments and management strategies, this paper explores linkages between biophysical, socioeconomic, and perceptual aspects of...

Purpose – The vulnerability and adaptive capacities of cities in Latin America have received relatively less attention compared to other regions of the world. This chapter seeks to address these gaps by (a) examining vulnerability to the health impacts from air pollution and temperature, and exploring whether socioeconomic factors between neighborh...

Research on urban vulnerability has grown considerably in the last several years but is still largely limited and characterized by constraints based on interdisciplinary differences in definition and scope. This review explores how urban vulnerability has been framed in recent climate change and risk research and examines the contributions and limi...

Environmental effects on human migration constitute an important area in the study of the relationship between population and the environment. In the past decade, there has been growing attention to the populations displaced by floods, storm surges, droughts, and other environmental hazards which will be exacerbated by climate change. Increased con...

Environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources constitute two research traditions regarding the interactions between societies and the natural world. While discussion of the relationships between these two fields is largely restricted to the United States, their implications for developing disciplines focused on environment and soci...

Rural migration and its relationship to the rural environment have attracted increasing research interest in recent decades. Rural migration constitutes a key component of human population movement, while rural areas contain most of the world's natural resources such as land and forests. This study empirically evaluates a conceptual framework incor...

The socioeconomic and environmental features of local places (community context) influence the relationship between humans and their physical environment. In times of environmental disturbance, this community context is expected to influence human perceptual and behavioral responses. Residents from nine Colorado communities experiencing a large out...

Introduction The relationship between population and the environment holds an important role in research on the linkages between human society and ecological systems. As one of the key components of population dynamics , migration has become increasingly important in recent population and environment research. The mediating factor perspective of po...

The relationship between population and the environment holds an important role in research on the linkages between human society and ecological systems. Recent studies on population and the environment have turned research focus toward the more dynamic factor of population processes – migration. The mediating factor approach to population and envi...

Environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources are two key subdisciplines of the sociological study on the interactions between nature and human society. Previous dis- cussion on the relationships of these two fields has largely focused on their distinctions and synthesis in western (particularly Ameri- can) academia. Environmental...

Ecosystem disturbance by Mountain Pine Beetle is spreading rapidly across Colorado. To better understand how local communities and residents have reacted to this problem as well as the issue of invasive plants, the Community and Natural Resources Research Team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign administered a mail survey to residents...

This report examines the land use and changes in Southern Illinois. Land cover data provides general information on landscape and natural resources and can be used as an important indicator of local ecosystems. For purposes of this project, the Southern Illinois region includes the 20 southernmost counties in Illinois: Alexander, Franklin, Gallatin...

As part of the Southern Illinois Regional Assessment Project, a farming survey was conducted in April and May of 2007 in the twenty Southernmost Illinois counties: Alexander, Edwards, Franklin, Gallatin, Hamilton, Hardin, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Massac, Perry, Pope, Pulaski, Randolph, Saline, Union, Wabash, Wayne, White and Williamson. The obj...

This report examines the agricultural land use, agricultural production, and farm employment in Southern Illinois. The Southern Illinois region includes the southernmost 20 counties in Illinois: Alexander, Edwards, Franklin, Gallatin, Hamilton, Hardin, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Massac, Perry, Pope, Pulaski, Randolph, Saline, Union, Wabash, Wayne...