Public's trust in wildland fire and fuel management decisions: data from a 2004 study in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana

Recent research has called for a more comprehensive approach to natural resource management that balances social, ecological, and economic obligations. Within this framework, this 2004 study examines the public's trust as a measure of managerial success, and attempts to identify and measure the components that most influence it. A review of trust literature yielded 14 attributes that were hypothesized to contribute to trust, in three dimensions. Based on this review, a telephone survey was developed and administered in the summer of 2004 to a sample of Montana residents in Ravalli county, living adjacent to the Bitterroot National Forest (N=1152). This data publication contains the 2004 survey results with a weighting variable based upon the distribution of the sample across the study area.
Following the severe forest fires in Western Montana in 2000, the Bitterroot National Forest commissioned a social survey to help gain a representative understanding of how residents of Ravalli County, Montana viewed the Bitterroot National Forest, and how they preferred it to be managed. One proposition that arose from responses to the survey was that some Bitterroot residents had a lack of trust in the USDA Forest Service. It was not clear how pervasive this lack of trust was, nor what it was limited in scope to. In order to gain insight into the causes and consequences of a lack of trust, as well as to gain a more thorough understanding of the extent of Ravalli County residents' trust in the Bitterroot National Forest, a study was initiated in 2004. Throughout 2005 and 2006, the data from that study served various purposes for interpretation: to evaluate levels of trust, fire and fuel management practices, and for general knowledge on individual-government relations. All analytical documents are based on the same data set, but the methods, results, and discussion are distinctly different.