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Modernity can be characterised by a shift from a communal to an individual orientation where social mobility is one of individuals' primary goals. However, for individuals to achieve social mobility, they often must also be geographically mobile. Consequently, geographic immobility or staying in place needs to be theorised and examined directly. In this context, the life course perspective provides a useful framework to understand staying. The role transitions associated with different life stages represent different decision points where choices to stay must be deliberate. We use state-representative data from Montana (USA) in 2010 to perform an exploratory analysis of stayers. Using a variety of community and individual predictors, we find that high community attachment, low satisfaction with one's community, and/or local services make being a stayer more likely. In separate models of being a stayer by rurality, age group, educational attainment, and having a dependent in the home, the pattern of results suggests that interpretations of high attachment and low satisfaction among stayers as being indicators of being "stuck" may be incorrect. Instead, even in the absence of being satisfied with one's community, community attachment may be indicative of deliberate decisions to stay. We discuss the limitations of addressing staying using cross-sectional data and suggest future avenues for better understanding those who stay in place throughout their lives.

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A key theoretical concept in the study of technological disasters is “recreancy,” which refers to perception that institutional actors have failed to carry out their responsibilities in a manner that engenders societal trust. Using household survey data from the Community Oil Spill Survey (COSS) to assess recreancy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we analyze four waves of the COSS collected between 2010 and 2013 to explore respondents’ perceptions of blame and distrust in relation to key institutional actors associated with the disaster, paying special attention to the influence of time and employment in natural resource occupations. We show that BP is clearly viewed as the principal responsible party at fault for the disaster and that the odds of blaming BP and the federal government have held relatively steady over time, while the odds of blaming state government increased over time. We find high levels of distrust of BP and the federal government, but show that odds of being distrustful of both institutional actors was significantly lower three years after the spill. Fishing households were significantly more likely to blame and be distrustful of institutional actors, a finding that is strongly consistent with theoretical expectations.

To what extent does community context influence individuals' proclivity to participate in community-oriented activities and projects? In this article we utilize survey data from residents of 99 Iowa communities to conduct a multilevel analysis of voluntary participation and community action, simultaneously addressing voluntary participation at the individual level and "community action" at the community level. Additionally, we test the suggestion that community attachment may constitute a unique form of social capital. The robustness of these data allows us to overcome the obstacles that have led to the conflation of individual-and community-level attributes in many community studies. We show that community attachment and community-oriented action are determined almost entirely by individuals' characteristics rather than by the characteristics of communities, and thus do not constitute community-level phenomena, calling into question the assumptions on which certain theoretical approaches to community are based.

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Migration is a standard survival strategy in the context of disasters. While prior studies have examined factors associated with return migration following disasters, an area that remains relatively underexplored is whether moving home to one’s original community results in improved health and well-being compared to other options such as deciding to move on. In the present study, our objective is to explore whether return migration, compared to other migration options, results in superior improvements to mental health. We draw upon data from a cross-sectional pilot study conducted 16 months after a series of volcanic eruptions in Merapi, Indonesia. Using ordinal logistic regression, we find that compared to respondents who were still displaced (reference category), respondents who had “moved home” were proportionally more likely to report good mental health (proportional odds ratios (POR) = 2.02 [95% CI = 1.05, 3.91]) compared to average or poor mental health. Likewise, respondents who had “moved on” were proportionally more likely to report good mental health (POR = 2.64 [95% CI = 0.96, 7.77]. The results suggest that while moving home was an improvement from being displaced, it may have been better to move on, as this yielded superior associations with self-reported mental health.