The primary objective of state fish and wildlife agency (sfwa) hunter education safety (he) programs is to promote safe, responsible, and ethical hunting practices

This Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service under the Multistate Conservation Grant Program (CFDA 15.628) provides $160,411.75 to the International Hunter Education Association - United States of America (IHEA-USA) to conduct a study on the effectiveness of hunter education delivery methods on hunting safety.

The primary objective is to use an interrupted time series analysis with an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to determine how hunter education delivery method (virtual, hybrid, in-person) affects the rate of hunting-related incidents, as reported by state fish and wildlife agencies. This will involve analyzing the national hunting incident database maintained by IHEA-USA to identify trends over time and evaluate the impacts of different hunter education program approaches. The project aims to provide state agencies and the broader conservation community with insights to guide future hunter education curriculum, course delivery policies, and safety initiatives.

In current practice, the preparedness of he students to achieve these behaviors is determined by using a minimal passing grade on the final examination, typically given at the end of a course. The covid-19 pandemic forced many sfwas to adopt online and hybrid models of he in addition to the traditional in-person programs. A previous multistate conservation grant (mscg) study, conducted by ihea (baer, dunfee, chase, 2021) found that virtual, hybrid, and in-person delivery methods had nearly identical results in terms of student satisfaction and student preparedness, as measured by the final exam score. Even though sfwas use the final exam score to certify to the conservation community, other hunters, and the non-hunting public that an individual is minimally competent to participate in hunting in a safe and legal way, one reasonable critique of that research is that exam score is likely only an indicator for hunter education knowledge, rather than a metric for likelihood of experiencing an actual hunting-related injury or accident (i.e., incident).the covid-19 pandemic provided an unprecedented situation in which he was delivered primarily using virtual and hybrid methods, as most in-person, field tests, and live-fire events were canceled. This phenomenon offers the conservation community a unique natural experiment to determine the effectiveness of hunter education, by delivery method, this time using a direct measure of hunter incident rates, rather than student exams and satisfaction as indices of safety. This study proposes to use an interrupted time series analysis with an autoregressive integrated moving average (arima) model to determine how he delivery method affects, or not, the safety of hunters in the field as directly measured by hunter incidents, as reported by the sfwas.currently, hunting incidents are collected each year by the international hunter education association U.S.A. (ihea-USA) from hunter education teams, which are often nested within law enforcement within sfwas. These collected data, when compiled correctly, has the potential to serve as a national resource for recruitment, retention capable of identifying trends in hunting incidents over time to aid sfwas and their partners in evaluating the impacts of future he programs, products, curriculum, and course delivery policy decisions. Fortunately, the existing national hunter incident database used by sfwas and ihea-USA has been recently redesigned and updated. This upgrade positions the database to serve as a national resource, offering new analysis tools for sfwas and industry researchers when examining the available data. While the customer experience and data entry options are improved, there are still gaps in the data from previous years which need to be collected from sfwas. This presents an opportunity as the data collection and analysis for this project will feed the new database and provide a model for data synthesis that can be used in future he evaluation efforts.