Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
This project's long-term goal is to provide evidence-based recommendations to rural community leaders and community development professionals about strategies mitigating abuse of opioids and other substances in the rural hospitality industry resulting in lower substance abuse rates in rural communities. This Seed Grant proposal is the first step toward identifying the influences of a substantial hospitality presence on rural communities' readiness to address and curb substance abuse. The proposal is exploratory because relatively little is known about the interactions between the hospitality industry, substance abuse, rural community development and planning, and the allocation of public health and social support systems.This project directly addresses the Program Area Priority Code A1661, Innovation for Rural Entrepreneurs and Communities. One of the promises of rural tourism development projects is encouraging local business formation and employment. However, the promise of tourism as a development pathway comes with peril - the documented epidemic of increased substance abuse among employees in tourism-related businesses.This overlap of promise and peril is an understudied component of rural tourism development. Long-term community sustainability rests on its overall well-being - healthy people, healthy economy, healthy environment. An economic development plan which does not also prepare for and mitigate potential unhealthy outcomes, such as increased opioid and substance abuse, will not be sustainable. This project will empirically measure communities' readiness for and barriers toward proactively mitigating the perils of opioid and substance abuse and thereby promotes sustainable economic promises for struggling rural communities.This project proposes a novel approach to gaining insight from multiple perspectives of rural tourism development: those of the tourism community leaders embedded in rural communities, rural community leaders, and rural community leaders who aspire to build a tourism base. The insights gained in this process will provide the framework for a larger integrated project designed to assist communities in preparing themselves to manage the promise of rural tourism as well as the perils of opioid and substance abuse.This project rests squarely upon the pressing need of resource-constrained rural communities to address the high and rising rates of opioid and other substance abuse. The US is facing a frightening opioid addiction dilemma. Rural places have higher rates of substance abuse (Paulozzi & Xi, 2008) and struggle to provide and maintain adequate healthcare infrastructure (Jones, Parker, Ahearn, Mishra, & Variyam, 2009). These challenges are exacerbated in a context where many rural communities face declining and aging populations, economic downturns associated with economic restructuring, and slow recovery from the 2007 Recession (Miller & Moon, 2017). In their efforts to address economic challenges, many rural communities have turned to tourist development and, for some communities, with great success. Those success stories have made tourist development even more attractive to still-struggling rural communities, and for those reasons, many aspire to develop their own tourist industries.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
80%
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
Long-term sustainability of the project will come in three forms. First, a specific objective of the project is to identify potential pathways for outreach activities to assist communities engaged in tourism development to take proactive steps towards substance abuse intervention and mitigation.Second, for the communities involved in the project, a report of their readiness will be shared with participants and the public, enhancing the local knowledge base and, potentially, spurring action on the part of the community. Third, dissemination of the findings of the project to members of the advisory council will provide stakeholders with concrete knowledge and familiarity with a process (Community Readiness) that may be advantageous for their own constituencies. Benefits to individuals and the communities involved should, therefore, continue after project termination.
Project Methods
As long recommended in field research (Gold, 1958), a site visit by members of the research team will be made to each community to better understand each community from a firsthand perspective and begin to establish relationships between the research team and community members. Extensive field notes will be kept, including where appropriate, both place and people based maps, and photographs will be taken to enhance the contextualization of each community. In some of the previous research of disaster survivors by one of the co-investigators, participation in publicly-attended community events, fairs, and festivals was found to be effective.The CRCC provides a protocol for measuring five primary aspects of community readiness through key informant interviews. These aspects are Community Knowledge of Efforts, Leadership, Community Climate, Knowledge about the Issue, and Resources for Efforts. Demographic information will also be collected in this stage. Following a site visit, telephone interviews will be conducted and recorded following guidelines provided in the CRCC.Scoring of the interviews will follow procedures outlined in the CRCC manual (Oetting et al., 2014). Two scorers will be used in evaluating all the interviews. Scorers meet and discuss their individual scores to obtain a consensus score; these consensus scores are entered into a table. Averages will be calculated for each dimension across all interviews. A brief summary report will be prepared that includes the dimension scores, their meanings (from the rating scales), and the major themes from the interviews.In addition to the CRCC empirical scores, all interviews will be analyzed qualitatively following standard procedures. Research team members will identify themes and code interview transcripts.