Fish Scales: Scale and Method in Social Science Research for North Pacific and West Coast Fishing Communities

Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA) and other legal mandates, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is conducting basic social science research on fishing communities. This basic research differs from issue-driven social impact assessments in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human organization 2006-10, Vol.65 (3), p.280-293
Main Authors: Sepez, Jennifer, Norman, Karma, Poole, Amanda, Tilt, Bryan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alaska
Anthropologists
Anthropology
Commercial fishing
Communities
Community
Community fisheries
Competition
Conservation
Environmental economics
Environmental policy
Ethnography
Executives
Field study
Fisheries
Fisheries management
Fisheries policy
Fisheries science
Fishery economics
Fishery sciences
Fishing
Fishing Communities
Fishing villages
Geographic regions
Geography
Heterogeneity
Information sharing
Management
Marine fish
Methodology
Methods
Multidimensional Representations of Fishing Communities
Ocean fisheries
Regional studies
Regions
Research methodology
Research methods
Science
Social anthropology
Social change
Social impact
Social Impact Assessment
Social indicators
Social research
Social Science Research
Social sciences
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Summary:Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA) and other legal mandates, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is conducting basic social science research on fishing communities. This basic research differs from issue-driven social impact assessments in that it does not address pending policy changes or specified locations. As a consequence, NMFS's basic social science research must cover very large geographic scales and address a broad array of analytical issues. These needs are in tension with the traditional ethnographic methods of anthropology and the MSFCMA's focus on the community as a unit of analysis. This paper describes how anthropologists at NMFS's Alaska Fisheries Science Center and Northwest Fisheries Science Center navigate these conflicting imperatives by adopting large-scale community profiling using social and fishing indicators informed by ethnographic site visits, and advocating a "nested-scale" analytical framework that imbricates the community level analytical unit with macro-level considerations related to regional and global forces and micro-level dynamics related to intra-community heterogeneity.
ISSN:0018-7259
1938-3525
DOI:10.17730/humo.65.3.70lb0n7q6l1j516v