Institutionalizing Social Science Data Collection: A Pilot Project
The Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership’s Community Panels Project, funded by the Northeast Consortium and Saltonstall-Kennedy grants, is focused on six communities: Beals Island/Jonesport and Portland, Maine; Gloucester, Scituate and New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Point Judith, Rhode Island. MIT Sea Grant College Program’s anthropologist, Dr. Madeleine Hall-Arber, is the project leader with Dr. Bonnie McCay of Rutgers University and David Bergeron of the MFP as co-principal investigators. Community-based panels will create and revise socio-economic profiles for their communities. We seek to provide fisheries managers with information that will enable them to more accurately anticipate social impacts of regulations, proposed or existing. The six communities in the study represent the variety of characteristics found in New England’s fishing industry including inshore/offshore, large/small vessels; urban/rural communities; fish/shellfish products; mobile/fixed gear; auction/entrepreneur-dealer, etc