Rural Sociology 72(2), 2007, pp.

215–243
Copyright E 2007 by the Rural Sociological Society

Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks: The Effects of

Gender, Geography, and Progeny on Attitudes toward
a Nuclear Waste Facility*

William R. Freudenburg
University of California, Santa Barbara

Debra J. Davidson
University of Alberta

ABSTRACT Studies of reactions to nuclear facilities have found consistent

male/female differences, but the underlying reasons have never been well-
clarified. The most common expectations involve traditional roles—with
men focusing more on economic concerns and with women (especially
mothers) being more concerned about family safety/health. Still, with
changing gender roles, women are becoming economic providers as well as
caregivers; past studies have not actually examined the interaction of
employment and gender effects. This study examines a rural county where
issues of risk and economic interest were both salient—a county where
a nuclear waste site had been proposed but where an existing nuclear power
plant was a major employer. Overall, concern levels expressed by employed
mothers did not differ significantly from those in the rest of the sample, but
further analyses revealed a sharp contrast: In the half of the county that was
home to the existing nuclear power plant, where economic concerns could
be expected to be more salient, over 90 percent of the employed mothers
expressed low levels of concern; in the other half of the county, closer to the
potential risks of the proposed nuclear waste site, almost 90 percent of the
employed mothers expressed high levels of concern. No such differences are
found for other sociodemographic groups. This county may or may not be
unique; what the findings show is that the interplay of geography, gender
roles and risks should receive more attention in other contexts, as well.

Although many scholars have studied gender differences in views

toward risky or controversial facilities in rural communities, our
understanding of the relationship between gender and risk remains
elusive, due in no small part to an unfortunate lack of integration across
relevant fields of inquiry. As a step toward improved cross-fertilization,
this paper draws on three bodies of work that have often developed in
isolation to date—those on community responses to risky facilities, on
broader patterns of gender differences in orientations toward
technological risks, and on gender roles and relationships. We consider

* The authors wish to thank Elizabeth Boesch, Diane Burton, Jennifer Overhue, and
several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Address
correspondence to Dr. Freudenburg: Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society,
Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.

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all three in analyzing local responses to a proposal for the kind of

facility that Rosa and Clark (1999) have identified as a ‘‘paradigmatic’’
example of public controversy over scientific and technological risks—
a proposed repository for radioactive or nuclear wastes. The first main
section of this paper summarizes the existing scholarship; the second
presents an analysis of risk concerns in a rural county where the
relevant issues are present in high relief; and the third and final section
discusses both limitations and implications for future research.

Existing Scholarship
Although empirical studies of overall environmental concerns have
produced mixed results (Davidson and Freudenburg 1996; McStay
and Dunlap 1983), studies of local environmental risks have consistently
found more concern among women than among men (e.g., Benford
Moore and Williams 1993; Blocker and Eckberg 1989; Bord and
O’Connor 1992, 1997; Davidson and Freudenburg 1996; Desvouges et
al. 1992; Spies et al. 1998; Wulfhorst and Krannich 1999; for a rare
exception, see Krannich and Albrecht 1995). The gender difference in
concern is especially clear in the case of nuclear facilities: A systematic
review found 36 existing studies that measured gender differences in
concern toward nuclear energy and wastes and noted that all 36 studies
showed women to be significantly more concerned than men (Davidson
and Freudenburg 1996; but see also Krannich and Albrecht 1995).
Explanations for this pattern, on the other hand, have been far less
consistent. Some studies simply characterize women as inherently more
‘‘risk averse’’ (Fothergill 1996). A few studies have attributed gender
gaps to differences in levels of knowledge between women and men
(e.g., Jenkins-Smith et al. 1991; Kasperson 1976), but more studies have
found that knowledge is not a significant predictor of concern (e.g.,
Brody and Fleischman 1993; George and Southwell 1986; Mitchell
1984). In addition, the knowledge scales often suffer from methodo-
logical flaws, most notably in emphasizing the specific facts that are
stressed by one side in the given debate, while ignoring equally
legitimate facts emphasized by the other side (see Davidson and
Freudenburg 1996; Reed and Wilkes 1980). Some scholars have
reasoned that, where a gendered division of labor is characterized by
differential material relations to the natural world, levels of environ-
mental awareness and concern should be similarly differentiated
(Agarwal 1992; Merchant 1980). Still other analysts have employed
what is sometimes called the Social Amplification of Risk Framework
(SARF), which emphasizes that all risk perceptions—including those

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 217

that see a given risk as acceptable, as well as those that do not—are to

a significant degree socially constructed (e.g., Kasperson et al. 1988;
Pidgeon, Kasperson and Slovic 2003; Rosa 2003; see also Freudenburg
1988).
A particularly relevant line of reasoning involves the potential
significance of traditional gender roles in shaping differing priorities,
involving the centrality of economic concerns for men, as compared to
a greater emphasis on children’s safety and health among women (e.g.,
Brody 1984; Davidson and Freudenburg 1996; Hamilton 1985a, 1985b;
McStay and Dunlap 1983; Mitchell 1984; Roberts 1997; Stern, Dietz, and
Kalof 1993; Stout-Wiegand and Trent 1983). Nelkin (1981), one of the
first to address the question explicitly, suggested that women were ‘‘the
most active and outspoken critics of nuclear power’’ not because
women have a greater aversion to risk, nor because they were more
likely to identify themselves as ‘‘environmentalists,’’ but because of
‘‘the special effects radiation has on the health of women and on future
generations.’’ Subsequent empirical findings suggest that differences in
levels of opposition to nuclear technology may indeed be related to
higher levels of concern about safety among women (Bachtel and
Molnar 1991; Barke, Jenkins-Smith, and Slovic 1994; George and
Southwell 1986; MacGregor et al. 1994; Passino and Lounsbury 1976)—
particularly women with young children at home (Bord and O’Connor
1992; Cable 1992; Hamilton 1985a; 1985b; but see Benford et al. 1993;
Krannich and Albrecht 1995).
Because gender differences are sustained in part through differential
familiarity with occupational tasks (Deaux 1976; cf. Gerrard 1994),
traditional gender roles have long been reinforced by the historical
division of labor in industrial societies. Traditional roles have changed
substantially in recent decades, however, particularly with women’s
increasing participation in the paid workforce (e.g., Albrecht, Albrecht,
and Albrecht 2000; White and Rogers 2000). Still, although women may
now have gained much more first-hand familiarity with economic roles,
there has been little reduction in women’s care-giving responsibilities
(see e.g., Apter 1994; Bottero 2000; Lindsey 1997), suggesting that
working women with dual, family-plus-financial responsibilities might
well experience more complex pressures than traditionally assumed in
the past. In addition, shifts in gender roles can vary tremendously,
depending on the context. Given that rural job opportunities have
historically been concentrated in male-dominated occupations, for
example, Cotter et al. (1996) have noted that traditional gender roles
may be slower to change in rural regions than in metropolitan ones.
Findings to date on the implications of women’s workforce participa-

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tion have been limited and mixed; Dalto and Slagter (2001), for
example, report that employment in jobs requiring great physical
strength contributes to the development of socially conservative
attitudes in men, but not in women, while Rogers and Amato (2000)
report gender-role attitudes to be less traditional among U.S. couples
married in 1980 than among those married 16 years earlier (see also
Fuller 2000; Riggs 1997).
Clearly, there is a need for greater attention to changes in what have
long been seen as ‘‘traditional’’ gender roles. In particular, given
women’s increasing familiarity with traditionally male economic roles,
the obvious question is whether women will begin to adopt perspectives
associated with ‘‘traditionally male’’ gender roles, or whether they will
continue to place a greater emphasis on protecting family safety and
health.
Unfortunately, although gender researchers such as Bridges and
Ozra (1992; 1993) have emphasized the potential importance of
multiple roles, particularly for women, past empirical research has
devoted little attention to the potential for conflict between economic
and family health/safety concerns. In the previously noted examination
of 75 studies of gender and environmental concern, Davidson and
Freudenburg (1996) found only a handful of studies that included
either women’s employment status or domestic roles, and none
examining both. The few studies of environmental risk concerns that
have analyzed either occupational or domestic roles, moreover, have
been far from conclusive.
The potential significance of parental status may first have been
indicated by a study of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island,
which found that families with preschool children were more likely to
evacuate (Dohrenwend et al. 1981). A few years later, Hamilton (1985a,
1985b) found that women with young children expressed more
concern toward local toxic contamination than any other subgroup in
his sample. George and Southwell (1986) focused on the parental roles
of both men and women, finding men with children to be in favor of
licensing a nuclear power facility, while men without children—and
women both with and without children—were opposed. In an
examination of general environmental concern, Blocker and Eckberg
(1989) found mothers of small children to express less concern over
the economic effects of environmental controls, while fathers were
more concerned. Mohai (1992) reported higher levels of general
environmental concern among women, but found that homemaker
status was not significant.

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 219

Of the studies that have looked more specifically at occupational

roles, similarly, some results appear to conflict with theoretical
expectations. Blocker and Eckberg (1989, 1997) found that employed
women were more environmentally concerned than other respondents.
Their latter article (Blocker and Eckberg 1997) added that women with
homemaker status tended to express lower levels of general environ-
mental concern than women in the workforce, while parental status was
associated with inconsistent results. A pair of studies focusing on
Nevada, the state chosen by the federal government as a potential site
for a high-level nuclear waste repository, produced mixed findings: In
a statewide survey by Desvouges et al. (1993), women expressed
significantly more concern than men; that study also found persons
with children were moderately more concerned than others (p , .10),
although the authors did not report the effects of the presence of
children separately for women and men. By contrast, a second survey of
the four southern Nevada communities that were closest to the
proposed repository found no differences by sex, as well as finding
that repository opponents were less likely than supporters to have
children at home (Krannich and Albrecht 1995). Mixed findings also
emerged from two studies of Boyd County, Nebraska, which had been
selected as a potential site for a low-level radioactive waste facility. A
1990 survey found women to be significantly more concerned than men
(Benford et al.1993), while a 1992 survey found no difference in
concern levels (Krannich and Albrecht 1995); neither survey found the
presence of children to correlate significantly with levels of concern.
In summary, existing studies have varied considerably in controlling
for other factors that might influence the results, such as education, but
at least one overall pattern has been sufficiently consistent across
studies to warrant further examination. As noted in what remains the
most extensive review available (Davidson and Freudenburg 1996), the
key pattern is that women appear to express higher levels of concern
over many environmental risk issues than do men, with differences
being particularly noteworthy in cases involving nuclear technologies,
especially in respondents’ own communities. In a second pattern that
has been documented with reasonably high levels of consistency, the
presence of children has generally been found to correlate with
heightened concern levels in women—although children appear to
have an impact on men’s concern levels that is more mixed, yet less
likely to have been examined in past work. Other patterns of findings,
on the other hand—including the kinds of more detailed findings that
might ultimately help to provide greater insights into the overall
patterns—have been characterized by far less consistency to date, both

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in of the consistency of having been studied and in terms of the

findings that have emerged.

Implications for Research

To repeat our earlier point, there is a particularly clear need for
research to consider the influence of changing gender roles. In recent
decades, shifts in women’s occupational and income-earning roles have
been widespread, but they have not been evenly distributed. In
particular, it would make sense to expect not just cultural and ethnic
variations, but also particularly complex role dynamics for working
mothers who continue to bear primary responsibility for children’s well-
being, even if that ‘‘traditional’’ responsibility is increasingly being
combined with an expanded responsibility for generating income. In
short, although care-giving concerns may still be as important to
mothers as are concerns for economic well-being—or more so—the
empirical findings just summarized suggest that matters may not be so
simple. Yet there are also at least four other reasons why further
research is needed.
First, the expectation for clear value differences between women and
men has been challenged (Stern et al. 1993; see also Flynn, Slovic, and
Mertz 1994). Although a number of potential explanations are based
on the assumption that there will be clear gender differences in values,
Stern et al. found that women did differ from men in environmental
risk concerns, but not in value orientations: Men and women in their
study actually had similar norms and value systems. Instead, the
differences in risk concerns were found to result from the fact that the
same stimuli could activate economic/individualistic concerns for men,
while activating concerns about the welfare of others and of the
environment for women.
Second, the tendency to look for ‘‘overall’’ differences among
respondents—as in asking whether women are generally more ‘‘risk
averse’’ than men, or raising questions about what one journalistic
account (Braus 1994) called ‘‘worry-wart women’’—runs the risk of
essentialism, and hence of discounting the dynamic influence of
individual characteristics and experiences. In most studies, this point is
methodological as well as conceptual, often being a matter of omission
rather than of commission. When studies analyze overall differences
between women and men, in other words, without employing
a reasonably full range of potentially relevant controls, the studies
effectively treat ‘‘all women’’—and ‘‘all men’’—as static and un-
differentiated categories, when in fact there may be significant

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differences between women who work in the paid labor force, for
example, and those who do not (see also Flynn et al. 1994).
Third, as noted earlier, the tensions between economic and risk
concerns may well be especially pronounced in rural regions, where
traditional gender norms can often remain the strongest, and where
opportunities for paid employment can remain the weakest. Indeed,
several studies have found issues of jobs and environment to be highly
salient in rural or non-metropolitan regions (see e.g., Albrecht, Amey,
and Amir 1996; Krannich and Albrecht 1995; Murdock et al. 1991; Spies
et al. 1998; Wulfhorst 2000; Wulfhorst and Krannich 1999; see also
Bailey and Faupel 1992; Bailey, Faupel, and Holland 1992). The
problem may well be particularly acute for women who live in the most
traditional of rural areas (see e.g., Bourke 1994; Gulliford 1989;
Krannich and Luloff 1991; Peluso, Humphrey, and Fortmann 1994;
Spies et al.1998).
Fourth and more broadly, risk needs to be understood in terms of its
social context and its implications for the social fabric (Short 1984;
Short and Rosa 2004; see also Alario and Freudenburg 2003, in press;
Freudenburg and Pastor 1992; Rosa 1998; Short and Clarke 1992). In
much of the research to date, the focus has tended to be on the
individual, as an individual; individuals who work within a given
industry, for example, are expected to have systematically different
views from those who do not. Such logic may be reasonable, up to
a point, but ultimately, there is also a need to consider factors that go
beyond strictly individualistic ones. A number of gender studies, after
all, have noted a tendency for women to care not just about their own
prosperity and well-being, but about the prosperity and well-being of
those around them (see e.g., Chodorow 1978; Keller 1985). In rural
communities in particular, given the importance of what Couch and
Kroll-Smith (1994:26) call ‘‘interactional resources’’—‘‘bonds of
communal association manifested in emotional intensity, intimacy,
and mutual exchange’’—studies suggest that concerns for others may
well cross gender lines. Attitudes toward controversial facilities, for
example, have been shown to have been shaped by perceptions of
community economic prospects, not individual ones (see e.g., Bourke
1994; Freudenburg and Gramling 1994; Spies et al. 1998; see also the
work of Wulfhorst and colleagues [Wulfhorst 2000; Wulfhorst and
Krannich 1999] on the importance of ‘‘community identity’’ and
collective as opposed to individual stigmatization).
Particularly in a region with few employers, high unemployment, and
high densities of acquaintanceship (Freudenburg 1986),even if
individuals do not expect to be employed (or endangered) by a given

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facility themselves, their views toward that facility can be shaped by the
facility’s implications for their neighbors, friends, and/or relatives (see
also especially Gore 1978). In rural regions, in other words, it may be
less relevant to know a respondent’s own place of employment than to
know whether the community is one in which a controversial
technology provides employment for a significant fraction of that
respondent’s friends and neighbors.
Just such a community-based approach to the assessment of risk
concerns is the one that will be used in the following analysis. In
addition, the analysis will seek to provide a clearer understanding of the
growing number of women who have taken on what have often been
seen in the past as conflicting roles—entering the paid workforce but
often continuing to play roles as mothers and domestic caregivers, as
well. In particular, we will focus on women who are simultaneously
faced with potential concerns over economic well-being as well as
potential technological threats to family health and safety. Will they
continue to reflect ‘‘traditionally female’’ concerns about family
health/safety; will they begin to show higher levels of economic
concerns that have traditionally been found among men; or will they
react in ways that suggest new and more complex patterns of response?
The issue is clearly an empirical one.

A Closer Examination
A natural experiment for examining the interaction of women’s
employment and parental status is available from a rural county in
Nebraska. The opportunity, however, requires us to focus on the
variation that exists within the county, rather than being content to
treat the entire county as a unit. Although the latter approach is
relatively common in rural sociology, the findings will show that it
would be a mistake at least in this context to treat the ‘‘overall’’ county
findings as being representative of the many types of people who
actually live within the county boundaries. We will first briefly describe
the county and then discuss data and analysis.

Study Location
Nemaha County, which lies along the Missouri River at the eastern edge
of Nebraska, was one of three counties in the state named in 1988 as
a potential host location for a facility to store low-level nuclear or
radioactive wastes. This same county also happens to be the site of
a nuclear power plant—Cooper Nuclear Station, which employed
roughly 500 people at the time (Nebraska Public Power District 1989).

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 223

The county’s nuclear power plant has been in operation since 1974,
and by the late 1980s, it had what was widely perceived locally to be
a safe operating record. Qualitative fieldwork by the senior author in
the 1980s showed that concerns about jobs were highly salient in the
region, and that this nuclear power plant was considered one of the few
places in the county to offer reasonably high wages.
The proposed facility for nuclear or radioactive wastes (the terms are
often used interchangeably) would have provided only about 20
additional jobs for local residents (for further details, see Freudenburg
and Gervers 1990). Still, even such small numbers of jobs can prove
highly salient in rural regions (Krannich and Luloff 1991; Spies et al.
1998). More importantly, the vast majority of low-level nuclear waste is
produced by nuclear power plants, and according to many nuclear
power proponents, the inability to find suitable waste facilities could
ultimately create problems for the continued operation of existing
plants (e.g., National Research Council 1996). The proposed nuclear
waste facility could thus be expected to have been strongly supported by
local residents who were worried about the economic viability of the
local nuclear power plant, tempering their concerns about any
implications for health and safety.

Data Collection
As part of the ‘‘Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of
1985’’—the federal legislation intended to deal with low-level radioac-
tive waste disposal—the nation was divided into a set of seven ‘‘regional
compacts,’’ each of which was responsible for selecting a site for
regional waste disposal. Nebraska is part of the Central Interstate
Compact, which also includes Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and
Kansas. The member states selected three counties in Nebraska as
potential sites for waste disposal, ultimately choosing Boyd County,
Nebraska, which has been the focus of other studies (see especially
Benford et al.1993; Krannich and Albrecht 1995). The present study
focuses on Nemaha County—one of the other two counties (along with
Nuckolls County) that were not ultimately chosen as the preferred site.
Early in the selection process, the State of Nebraska established local
‘‘monitoring’’ or oversight committees, providing each with a budget of
$100,000 for activities that could include attitudinal studies. In 1989,
the Nemaha County monitoring committee contracted with the Bureau
of Sociological Research at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to
conduct a telephone survey of residents. Later, the senior author of this
paper was invited by the committee to visit the county, participate in

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public meetings, do a modest amount of qualitative fieldwork, and

analyze the results of the telephone survey (see Freudenburg and
Gervers 1990 for details).
Given the funding limitations and narrow attitudinal focus of the
survey, relatively few items were included, permitting only a limited
level of detail in analysis. Still, the survey did include information on
the parental as well as the employment status of both men and women.
The final sample included 228 completed interviews with persons
19 years of age and above, who were identified through the use of
random number charts from households that, in turn, were randomly
selected from county telephone listings. Interviews were successfully
completed for 73 percent of the households having eligible telephone
numbers. (The county is predominantly rural, with very few unlisted
telephone numbers; in the state of Nebraska as a whole, only 5 percent
of households had unlisted telephone numbers at the time of the
survey [Booth 1990].)

Analytical Advantages
The combined presence of the Cooper Nuclear Station and the
proposed nuclear waste facility offers four key advantages. First,
whether through a drive to lessen cognitive dissonance—the sense of
discomfort that can result from inconsistencies between one’s beliefs
and actions (Festinger 1957)—or through the pattern suggested by
Deaux (1976), namely that work in technical occupations can lead to
a sense of control through the experience of seeing a technology
respond more or less as intended (see also Gusterson 1992), women
with experience living near and/or working in a nuclear power plant
might well be expected to have lower levels of concern toward nuclear
safety. Second, local perceptions of a safe operating record for the
power plant would be expected to reduce the overall intensity of safety
concerns, contrary to what might be expected where a local facility had
proven more troublesome (Freudenburg and Baxter 1984; Freuden-
burg and Jones 1991; Stoffle et al. 1988). Third, as might be expected in
an area with few high-paying employment options, especially for
women, qualitative fieldwork indicated that nuclear facility employment
opportunities had considerable salience for women as well as men,
particularly for those who were concerned about employment. Fourth,
the physical and cultural geography of the county offers an important
opportunity for examining the distribution of responses.
Culturally, as noted by several respondents, the eastern and western
‘‘halves’’ of the county reflect different ethnic histories (Salamon 1984;

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 225

Figure 1. Nemaha County. Nebraska (Study Area)

1992). The deep, rich and more profitable loess soils that lie closest to
the Missouri River, along the eastern edge of the county, were largely
settled by what Salamon called ‘‘Yankee’’ farm families, soon after the
area was opened to European settlement in 1854. By contrast, the
somewhat less agriculturally attractive western half of the county was
settled a generation or more later, largely by farmers with German,
French, and other national backgrounds. Several locals referred to U.S.
highway 75, which runs from north to south through the middle of the
county, as a rough dividing line between these groups, while others
placed the dividing line further to the east. Rather than focusing
predominantly on the cultural differences in orientations toward land
and stewardship identified by Salamon, however, our work pays greater
attention to the fact that Nemaha County is characterized by another,
potentially significant East/West divide: As indicated in Figure 1, the
existing nuclear power plant was located at the eastern edge of the
county, while the proposed site for the low-level radioactive waste
facility was in the western half, up-gradient from and separated from
the power plant by another river and its associated landforms.

Results
The survey included only one question that directly measured
respondents’ overall orientation toward the proposed facility. The

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226 Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

question was reverse-worded (‘‘I would not be at all concerned about

the presence of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility in Nemaha
County, if it should be located here’’), with response categories ranging
from ‘‘strongly agree’’ to ‘‘strongly disagree.’’ Eight other items
focused on more specific concerns and behavioral intentions regarding
the proposed facility; four items assessed a respondent’s reported
likelihood of moving his/her residence, farm, or business, or deciding
to attend a different church, and four items assessed the ways in which
respondents expected the facility to affect property values, business and
farm expansion, and the marketability of local farm products.

Dependent Variable Construction

All nine items associated with potential concerns over the proposed
facility were subjected to a principal components factor analysis. Three
of the four behavioral intention items had weak loadings, largely
because few respondents answered items that focused on individual
respondents’ ‘‘own’’ business/farming operations. The item assessing
the likelihood of reductions in future farm expansion had low loadings
as well, perhaps in part because the county had experienced several
decades of farm expansion at the time of the survey. After low-loading
items were dropped, the remaining five items produced a strong one-
factor solution, with an Eigenvalue . 3.0 and with all factors having
loadings of 0.7 and above (no other factor even approached an
Eigenvalue of 1.0). Factor score coefficients from the five-variable
analysis were used to produce a composite factor variable. Given that, as
can be seen from Table 1, the ‘‘concern’’ item had a strong negative
loading (20.781), the resultant factor scale variable (named ‘‘SUPRT-
FAC’’ in the following tables) can be taken as indicating general support
for the proposed nuclear waste facility. This scale will be used as the
dependent variable for all analyses reported here, save for a final
analysis, in which the results from the findings from this multi-item
scale will be double-checked against the results from the single item
that most clearly assessed respondent concerns about the proposed
facility.
Although the survey lacks several measures that would have been
useful to include in an ideal world, it did include other items that have
received little attention in past research. In particular, the survey
identified not just residents who lived on farms or in communities, but
also those living in open country but not on farms—a group that would
later receive increasing attention as having particularly strong
opposition to government regulation (see e.g. Armas 2004; La Ganga

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 227

Table 1. Potential Measures of Concern over Proposed Radioactive

Waste Facility*
Variable: Factor Loadings Factor Scores
CONCERN 2.78087 2.25563
EXPROPVL .83237 2.24335
CHCHURCH 2.74336 .27248
EXBUSEXP .78818 .25801
EXFARMPR .76049 .24895
* Results of Principal-Components Analysis (missing values replaced with mean values),
where CONCERN 5 ‘‘I would not be at all concerned about the presence of a low-level
radioactive waste disposal facility in Nemaha County, if it should be located here.’’ (Range
of potential responses: Strongly Agree 5 1; Strongly Disagree 5 4).
EXPROPVL 5 ‘‘What do you think will happen to property values here in Nemaha
County? Do you think they will go up, stay about the same, or do you think they will go
down?’’ (Values will go up 5 1; Values will go down 5 3).
CHCHURCH 5 ‘‘If a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility were to be located within
a half mile of the church you attended, how likely is it you would attend another church or
stop going altogether?’’ (Very Likely 5 1; Not too Likely 5 3).
EXBUSEXP 5 ‘‘How about plans for business expansion? Do you think that there will be
more plans for expansion, stay about the same, or do you think there will be fewer plans
for expansion?’’ (More plans for Expansion 5 1; Fewer plans for Expansion 53).
EXFARMPR 5 ‘‘What about the marketability of livestock, grain, and other farm produce?
Do you think the value will increase, stay about the same, or do you think they will become
less marketable?’’ (Market Value will Increase 5 1; Market Value will Decline 5 3).

2004). In addition, the survey identified self-employed business owners

and farmers—two types of households often but not always identified as
strong opponents to environmental safeguards (Buttel and Flinn 1974;
Jones and Dunlap 1992; Van Liere and Dunlap 1980; but see also
Freudenburg 1991). Other sociodemographic measures included sex,
marital status, age, education, presence of children under 18, and labor
force participation.
Perhaps the two most notable variables omitted from the survey were
items indicating where in the county a respondent lived, and whether
anyone in a given household was employed at the nuclear power plant.
While unfortunate, however, neither proves to offer insurmountable
obstacles for obtaining useful findings. We were able to recreate
reasonably clear assessments of places of residence by taking advantage
of the fact that each community in the county has its own three-digit
telephone prefix. Thanks to the careful record-keeping and helpful
assistance provided by the Bureau of Sociological Research, we were
able to construct a reasonably definitive identification of the specific
communities in or near which all respondents lived.
In the case of the absence of information on persons working for the
nuclear power plant, no such options were available for creating the
relevant information in retrospect, but there are two compensating

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228 Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

factors that lessen to some degree the significance of the omission.

First, there are good reasons to expect this county to exemplify a ‘‘social
multiplier effect’’ (Freudenburg and Gramling 1994) that has been
noted in previous studies. As noted in those earlier studies, the citizens
of rural communities with few employers can often be expected to care
not just about the facilities that provide their own employment, but also
about those that provide employment for others, many or most of
whom are close personal acquaintances (see e.g., Bourke 1994; Spies et
al. 1998; Wulfhorst 2000; Wulfhorst and Krannich 1999). In this county,
for example, concerns about employment prospects emerged clearly in
the qualitative fieldwork that was carried out shortly after the time of
the survey, even though the vast majority of persons expressing such
concerns were already employed full-time. The relevance of such a social
multiplier effect might even have an associated effect, given the power
plant’s safety record: Not only can the experience of safe operation be
reassuring, but the fact that one knows and trusts the individuals who work
there might well offer an additional level of reassurance.
The second compensating factor is that the nuclear power plant
could not have employed a high fraction of the survey respondents in
any case. Even in the highly unlikely event that every single worker at
the plant would have been a resident of the county, the nuclear power
plant would have accounted for roughly 12.5 percent of the county
workforce—and the 1990 and 2000 Censuses reported that roughly 25–
30 percent of all workers in the county actually commuted in from
other counties or sates (Overhue 2003, 2006). Qualitative fieldwork
indicated that nuclear power plant workers, who enjoyed relatively high
wages, were especially likely to live outside of the county; the plant is
roughly a ten-minute drive from Interstate 29, as well as being located
about an hour away from three urban areas—St. Joseph, Missouri,
Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area.
Still, even if the power plant workers were no more likely than average
to live outside of the county, this would suggest that fewer than one out
of ten of the county’s workers would have been employed at the plant—
and given that roughly 18 percent of the workers living in the county
commuted to other counties to reach their actual places of work, the
overall probability of any given respondent living in a household having
someone employed at the power plant would be reduced to under 8
percent, which would translate to approximately 17 respondents in the
entire sample. In sum, while the omission of this information is
regrettable, and it does mean that the present findings need to be
interpreted with caution rather than being seen as the final word on the

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 229

topic, its main implication is that there will be a need for similar
questions to receive greater attention in future research.
In the pages that follow, we refer to the eastern/western ‘‘sides’’ of
the county, but it needs to be understood that residents are somewhat
more concentrated in places of residence. As indicated by Figure 1, the
county seat of Auburn lies near the center but is generally seen as part
of the western side of the county, as are the smaller towns of Julian,
Brock, and Johnson. The towns of Peru, Nemaha and Brownville are
the three main population centers for the east side of the county; all lie
in the Yankee farming belt and within two miles of the Missouri River.
According to population figures from the 1990 Census, roughly two-
thirds of the county’s population lived in these seven municipalities,
with the remaining one-third living in the countryside. Auburn—the
community closest to the proposed nuclear waste facility, as well as the
county seat—was home to nearly half of the county’s residents (3,443 of
7,980) and survey respondents (99 of 228). In the eastern side of the
county, populations and sample respondents are more evenly distrib-
uted, with slightly more respondents (29) coming from the larger town
of Peru than from the smaller towns of Nemaha and Brownville (17 and
21, respectively).
Table 2 reports the correlations of the potential independent or
control variables with one another and with the dependent variable,
‘‘SUPRTFAC.’’ As can be seen, at least the zero-order correlations with this
dependent variable show only a weak correlation with sex and parental
status, indicating very little difference between women with children at
home versus the rest of the sample. Contrary to what would be expected
from previous research, the support factor has strongly significant
positive zero-order correlations with the presence of children in the
home and with years of education, while there is a strongly significant
negative zero-order correlation between support and status as self-
employed business owners and/or farmers. The strongest zero-order
correlation with support in this sample is provided by knowing whether
a respondent lived on a farm, in town, or in the country but not on
a farm: Farmers had the lowest levels of support for the proposed
facility, and non-farm country residents had the strongest support.
Given the small sample size, and the tendency for regression-type
techniques to ‘‘lose’’ specific groups of interest—in this case, women
who are employed outside of the home while having children at
home—we need analytical techniques that permit the most fine-grained
examination that can be offered by the available data. For individual
questionnaire items, the highest level of precision is permitted by one
of the oldest of analytical techniques, cross-tabulation, which we report

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 230

Table 2. Correlations between Independent Variables and SUPRTFAC

SUPRTFAC SEX MOMwKIDS KIDSPRES AGE EDUC_YRS WORKFRC SELFOTH3 FARMTOWN
SUPRTFAC 1.0000 ( 211) ( 211) ( 211) ( 210) ( 211) ( 211) (211) ( 211)
SEX .1236{ 1.0000 ( 228) ( 228) ( 227) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228)
MOMwKIDS .0225 2.4041*** 1.0000 ( 228) ( 227) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228)
KIDSPRES .1946** .0240 .6944*** 1.0000 ( 227) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228) ( 228)
AGE 2.1783{ 2.0442 2.4488*** 2.6116*** 1.0000 ( 227) ( 227) ( 227) ( 227)
EDUC_YRS .2196** 2.0831 .2158** .2838*** 2.3564*** 1.0000 ( 228) ( 228) ( 228)
WORKFRC .1171{ .2789*** .1665 .3747*** 2.4819 .0558 1.0000 ( 228) ( 228)
SELFOTH3 2.2594*** 2.1054 .2104** .1863** 2.1732** .0912 .1619* 1.0000 ( 228)
FARMTOWN .3288*** .0686 2.0236 .1210{ 2.0921 .0979 .0409 2.3817*** 1.0000
Number of cases indicated (in parentheses) above the diagonal; correlations indicated below diagonal; { p # 0.10; * p # 0.05; ** p , 0.01; *** p ,
0.001.

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Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

SUPRTFAC: 5-item scale, Support for Proposed Repository (see Table 1). MOMwKIDS: 1 for women with children at home, 0 otherwise. SEX: 1 for
men; 0 for women. KIDSPRES: 1 for presence of children under 18 in household, 0 otherwise. WORKFRC: 1 if respondent is working or looking
for work, 0 otherwise. SELFOTH3: 1 if respondent and/or spouse is self-Employed, 0 otherwise. FARMTWN3: 1 5 live on farm; 2 5 live in town;

230
35 live in country, not farm.
 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 231

at the end of this section. For the multi-item scale SUPRTFAC, we employ
Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA), which allows us to hone in on
specific findings of interest, while still noting the effects of potential
control variables. In particular, MCA allows us to include continuous
variables (age, years of education) along with categorical variables that
should not be interpreted as being interval-level in nature, such as place
of residence. As an added safeguard, further analysis has been done ‘‘by
hand’’ to reveal patterns that are otherwise obscured when focusing on
the data set as a whole.
The two continuous variables (age and years of education) are listed
as ‘‘covariates’’ at the bottom of Table 3, complete with Beta
coefficients that can be interpreted in the same way as are standardized
regression coefficients. The categorical variables are reported in two
ways. The ‘‘unadjusted’’ scores show the average deviation from the
overall mean of SUPRTFAC for each category of an independent variable,
before the effects of other variables are controlled; the ‘‘adjusted’’
scores show the deviations once the other independent variables are
included. The two sets of scores can thus be seen as analogous to the
findings that might result from bivariate versus multivariate regression
analyses, respectively. The three columns of Table 3 report the results
from three different analyses. The first column reports the results from
the ‘‘saturated’’ or full model, which includes all of the available
independent variables. The second and third columns report the
‘‘reduced-form’’ results that remain after the reverse-elimination
technique that is recommended by textbooks such as Hamilton
(1990) as a safeguard against potential multicollinearity—removing
nonsignificant variables one at a time, while looking for any dramatic
swings in results in the remaining coefficients. There are two sets of
‘‘reduced-form’’ or final results, because the analyses revealed a very
different pattern of results for the persons who were in the labor force,
versus those who were not, particularly for the women.
As expected, the ‘‘unadjusted’’ results on the left side of the first
column provide roughly the same kind of information contained in
Table 2, save perhaps for findings from FARMTOWN, the variable
reporting places of residence. These findings, which are reported near
the lower-left corner of the table, are also worth examining as a way of
getting a sense of the way in which MCA results are reported. The ‘‘N’’
of 53 indicates that 53 persons in this sample lived on farms, and the
‘‘unadjusted deviation’’ of 2.38 indicates that these respondents had
an average score on SUPRTFAC that was 0.38 points lower than the overall
or grand mean. Those who lived in town, meanwhile, were .09 above
the mean, and those who lived in open country but not on farms were

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 232
Table 3. Results from Multiple Classification Analysis of ‘‘SUPRTFAC’’
Saturated/Full Model Final Model, Persons NOT in Workforce Final Model, Persons IN Workforce
Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for Other Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for
Grand Mean 5 2.19 order) Variables order) Other Variables order) Other Variables
Variable + Category N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta
MOMwKIDS
- 0 no, everyone else 168 2.01 .04 85 2.05 2.04 84 .04 .04
- 1 women with children 42 .03 2.15 12 .32 .25 30 2.13 2.10
.02 .11 .18{ .14{ .11 .09
AREA
- 1 Western County 151 2.04 2.03 84 .04 .04 68 2.10 2.12
- 2 Eastern County 59 .10 .07 13 2.26 2.25 46 .15 .18
.09 .07 .15 .14 .18* .23*
SEX
- 0 Women 125 2.07 2.02
- 1 Men 85 .10 .03
.12* .04
KIDSPRES
- 0 No 138 2.09 2.10
- 1 Yes 72 .18 .20

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Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

.19* .21*
WORKFRC
- 0 no 96 2.08 2.03

232
- 1 yes, working or looking 114 .07 .02
.11 .04
SELFOTH3
- 0 Neither Self-Empl 166 .09 .07 82 .15 .09
- 1 One/Both Self-Empl 44 2.34 2.27 32 2.39 2.22
.26*** .21*** .37* .21*
FARMTOWN
- 1 Farm 53 2.38 2.23 23 2.28 2.29 30 2.46 2.35
- 2 In Town 132 .09 .06 66 .10 .11 67 .09 .04
 Table 3, Continued
Saturated/Full Model Final Model, Persons NOT in Workforce Final Model, Persons IN Workforce
Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for Other Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for Unadjusted (zero- Adjusted for
Grand Mean 5 2.19 order) Variables order) Other Variables order) Other Variables
Variable + Category N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta N Deviation Eta Deviation Beta
- 3 Country, not on Farm 25 .32 .16 8 2.05 2.09 17 .46 .45
.34** .20** .24* .25* .45*** .38***

SIGNIFICANT 2-WAY INTERACTION(S): MOMwKIDS by AREA** (F 5 4,478, p 5 .037)

Covariates: Raw Regression Coefficient Raw Regression Coefficient

- EDUC_YRS: Years of .041* .054*
Education Completed
- AGE: Age, in Years

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2.001
Multiple R Squared .216 .173 .298
Significance Levels: { p # 0.10; * p # 0.05; ** p , 0.01; *** p , 0.001.

233
Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson
233
234 Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

clearly the most favorable, with support scores nearly a third of a point
higher than average. The eta of .34 (which is significant well beyond the
.001 level) can be interpreted as a measure of association that is
analogous to a standardized regression coefficient, or Beta, in that its
square indicates the proportion of variance ‘‘explained’’ by this
variable.
The ‘‘adjusted’’ results on the right side of the first column, as noted
above, show the effects of each variable when the effects of other
variables are controlled. The two variables remaining most strongly
significant are the FARMTOWN variable and the variable indicating
whether the respondent and/or his/her spouse is self-employed
(SELFOTH3). As can be seen, neither effect is changed dramatically by
the inclusion of other independent variables. Contrary to the common
expectation for self-employed business owners/farmers to have lower
environmental concern, these entrepreneurs prove significantly more
concerned about the proposed waste repository than other respon-
dents, underscoring the importance of the call by Neiman and
Loveridge (1981; see also Freudenburg 1991) to examine responses
to specific proposals before drawing conclusions regarding expected
environmental and/or risk concern levels among particular groups.
The variables of central concern for this paper—motherhood status
(MOMwKIDS) and workforce participation—show modestly significant
effects, also in the unexpected direction (p , .05).
As noted earlier, detailed examination did reveal one way in which
the removal of a single variable created dramatic changes in the
findings for the variables that remained. The findings for respondents
in the workforce are quite different from those for persons not in the
workforce—a difference that is particularly clear with respect to
working mothers. These results are summarized in the remaining
columns of Table 3. Among persons not in the workforce, although the
differences are not statistically significant, there are suggestions that
women with children at home may be somewhat more supportive than
average toward the proposed repository (p # .10). There is also no
significant two-way interaction between motherhood and the variable
measuring AREA of the county (which was deliberately retained, even
though it is not significant among persons not in the labor force, as
a way of calling attention to the absence of significant two-way
interactions among this group). The most significant variables are
residence on farms and education, both of which point to results that
are the opposite of what would be expected based on prior research
(see Jones and Dunlap 1992; Van Liere and Dunlap 1980): Persons
living on farms are significantly less supportive of the proposed facility

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 235

than their counterparts, while those with more education are more
supportive.
By contrast, the third column of Table 3 reveals a very different
pattern among those who are in the labor force, and among working
mothers in particular. The one point of commonality between the
second and third columns is that farmers remain significantly more
concerned than other groups in the sample, with an adjusted deviation
of 2.35 points from the mean—while employed persons who lived in
the country but not on farms prove to be the most supportive group of
all, with an adjusted deviation of +.45 (p , .001). In contrast with the
results for persons not in the labor force, education is no longer
significant, while both the AREA of the county, and the two-way
interaction between MOMwKIDS and AREA, emerge as significant
predictors. The interaction term indicates that mothers with children in
the eastern half of the county are more favorable toward the proposed
waste site, while those in the western half of the county, closer to the site
of the proposed waste site, are significantly less favorable.
To double-check our findings, we next examine this interaction more
closely, doing so in cross-tabular form. Table 4 shows the effect of
residence and of being a woman with children at home, strictly among
those respondents in the labor force. As can be seen, this category includes 13
of the 14 women in the sample with children at home in the eastern
part of the county, and 17 out of the 28 women with children at home
in the western part of the county. The effects of location could scarcely
present a sharper contrast. All but one of the working mothers in the
eastern part of the county—92.3 percent—express low levels of concern
about the proposed nuclear waste storage facility. In the west, by
contrast, all but two of the working mothers—88.2 percent—express
high levels of concern. Despite the small number of respondents in
these cells, this difference produces the strongest level of statistical
significance of any test in the analysis (p , 0.00001). The other
respondents in the western part of the county show a roughly even split
between opposition and support, while in the eastern part of the
county, there is roughly a 60/40 split between low/high levels of
concern (p ??? 0.4). Notably, although the strong differences among
working mothers are consistent both with the ‘‘changing gender roles’’
expectation and with ‘‘differing cultural orientations to land’’ expecta-
tions (Salamon 1984), the effects of gender roles appear to be more
pronounced. For all other respondents in the work force, the results of
a series of other cross-tabular analyses (not reported here) show much
smaller effects, on the order of ten percentage points, rather than
eighty.

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236 Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

Table 4. Concern Levels of Persons in Workforce, Controlling for

Area of County, Comparing Women with Children at Home against All
Other Respondents

AREAof County:
CONCERN level Western Side (proposed Eastern Side Row Total
waste site) (operating power plant)

Women in Workforce, with Children at Home

Low Concern 2 12 14
11.8% 92.3% 46.7%
High Concern 15 1 16
88.2% 7.7% 53.3%
Column Total 17 13 30
56.7% 43.3% 100.0%
Chi-Square 5 19.2 (1 D. F.); p # .00001; Pearson’s R 5 2.800; p , .000005.
All Other Respondents Currently in Workforce
Low Concern 26 20 46
51.0% 60.6% 54.8%
High Concern 25 13 38
49.0% 39.4% 45.2%
Column Total 51 33 84
60.7% 39.3% 100.0%
Chi-Square 5 0.749 (1 D. F.); p $ .35; Pearson’s R 5 2.094; p $ .35.
‘‘Concern’’ levels, as recoded from Table 2; Disagree/Strongly Disagree 5 Low
Concern, Agree/Strongly Agree 5 High Concern.
Workforce Participants include all survey respondents currently working and/or
seeking work.

Discussion
These findings differ in two main ways from those in most other studies
of gender and environmental risk concern. First, unlike most studies of
attitudes toward nuclear energy and wastes, this study finds overall
differences in attitudes between women and men to fall short of
standard levels of statistical significance. Second, we find overall levels
of concern about a proposed low-level nuclear waste facility among
women with children at home that, if anything, were lower than those
among men, or among women without children.
Although it is possible that the location of the present study is simply
anomalous, a more likely possibility is that the geographic character-
istics of this study location call for—and offer a unique opportunity
for—a more detailed examination of gender roles. Further examina-
tion reveals that, in the eastern part of Nemaha County, the site of the

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 237

nuclear power plant, over 90 percent of the women with children living
at home (and over 90 percent of those women who were engaged in the
workforce) expressed low levels of concern about the proposed nuclear
waste facility. In the western part of the county, where the facility would
have been located, nearly 90 percent of the women in the same
categories expressed high levels of concern. This was not simply a case
of a generic, favorable ‘‘risk perception shadow’’ (Stoffle et al. 1988):
Among many other socioeconomic groups—including women who did
not have children at home, as well as including those who were not in
the workforce—the east/west differences were statistically insignificant.
For the future, there would appear to be a need both for greater
analysis, empirically, and for greater synthesis, conceptually, with
particular focus on more complex structures of influence than have
been considered in past analyses. In terms of needed empirical work, it
is important to examine the extent to which this study’s findings may
have been influenced by the ‘‘Yankee/other’’ differences in the
farming history of the eastern/western halves of the county. Given
that women’s roles in ‘‘Yankee’’ culture traditionally centered on
providing a safe haven for the family—with economic issues generally
being seen as male concerns—this possibility appears inconsistent with
our finding that working women in the eastern or ‘‘Yankee’’ half of the
county had stronger economic concerns. Our judgment is that differing
cultural backgrounds are likely insufficient to explain the overall
pattern encountered in this study, given that the attitudinal differences
among working women could scarcely have been more complete, while
the differences among other groups were generally insignificant; still,
this is a question that can best be answered by future research. Another
valuable direction for future research, albeit one that has less to do with
changing gender roles, would be to follow up on the findings that
farmers actually showed high levels of environmental risk concern,
while non-farmers living in the unincorporated areas of the county had
some of the lowest environmental concern levels of all.
It will also be important to ask questions that relate to the risk
literature, such as whether this study’s findings may have been
influenced by the fact that the local nuclear power plant had what
most residents considered a safe operating record. As noted long ago by
Freudenburg and Baxter (1984; see also Freudenburg and Jones 1991),
the salience of economic concerns might not be sufficient to
counterbalance health and safety concerns in other locations, where
risk concerns might be more pronounced. Similarly, it is important to
consider further the potential for rural communities to represent
distinctive attitudinal patterns. In most rural communities, economic

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238 Rural Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2007

threats tend to be especially salient, social networks tend to reflect high

densities of acquaintanceship, and conservative ideologies—which can
discourage expressions of views that challenge the sanctity of in-
dividualism and economic enterprise—tend to be particularly strong
(Winson 1997). Indeed, given that the interactional resources of rural
residents tend to be geographically bounded (Couch and Kroll-Smith
1994), it is even possible that the virtual unanimity among working
women in each side of the county—despite the striking differences in
the direction of the views across the two sides—may well have been
influenced by the development of consensus within truly local social
networks, as employed women sought support from other women in
their communities in similar situations. This, however, is a possibility
that can only be tested in future research. The key point is that, in these
and other respects, there is a need for more fine-grained analysis that
asks not just whether men and women differ in their environmental risk
concerns, but which men and women differ most distinctly, and why.
In terms of conceptualization, it would be helpful if future thinking
could reduce the mutual isolation that has too often characterized
three areas of work—research on rural community reactions to local
facilities, on environmental risk concerns, and on gender roles.
Increased attention to synthesis and synergies across the three would
appear to offer particular promise for understanding the ways in which
individuals deal with potentially conflicting roles in times of social
change. With greater attention to integrating bodies of work that have
too often been separated in the past, we might well learn that rural
communities and regions—far from being insulated from broader
social changes—may under some circumstances be the specific
locations where the dynamics of change will come into especially sharp
focus.
Perhaps the central implication to be drawn from this study, in short,
is the need for further research. Given that the findings in this paper
come from a relatively small data set in a single location—and in
a location that was chosen in part because of its distinctiveness—it
would clearly not be appropriate to view our findings as definitive. Just
as clearly, however, it would be wrong for analysis to stop here. The
findings in Nemaha County provide an intriguing degree of support for
the possibility that women who take on ‘‘traditionally male’’ roles may
challenge many pre-conceived notions regarding gender and contem-
porary society. Increasing numbers of women find themselves needing
to combine responsibilities for family/community health and safety as
well as for filling economic roles that have traditionally been associated
with males, leading to obvious questions about the resultant mix of

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 Nuclear Families and Nuclear Risks — Freudenburg and Davidson 239

concerns over technological risk and over economic well-being. In this

study, economic concerns appear to have become more salient only
among women who lived in the area of the county that was more
directly dependent, economically, on an existing nuclear power plant,
and more remote from the risks that might be associated with the
proposed nuclear waste storage facility. For working women whose
families lived closer to the proposed nuclear waste site, on the other
hand, health and safety concerns appear to have overridden any
increased salience of economic concerns.
In the end, if the question is whether this study’s findings indicate
that we should expect identical patterns in all locations where
potentially risky facilities are proposed, the answer is simple—of course
not. When we turn to a more sensible question, however—the question
of whether we should find out if such effects are emerging in other such
locations—the answer, equally simply, is that of course we should. If any
one lesson can be made clear by the case presented here, in other
words, it is that, while this may be the first empirical study in rural (or
for that matter urban) communities to examine the interacting
dynamics of changing gender and economic roles on risk perceptions,
it needs to remain only the first such study—not the last.

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