Socio‐ecological systems and distress 643


FIG. 1 The direct and indirect ways in which interacting with ecosystems could influence the risk of psychological distress, depending on the psychobiological characteristics of an individual, within a socio-ecological system.


subsistence farmers or make a living through forest resource use. Weanticipated that these and other changes could have implications for residents’ experience of psychological dis- tress. However, these changes are typical of similar tran- sitions in other parts of Uganda and East Africa (Martiniello, 2021). As such, we expected our findings to be generalizable to similar contexts.


Methods


Study population and sample The study population includes male and female household heads (the primary decision-makers) over 18 years of age in the nine study communities. We selected household heads for this study because we presumed they would be knowl- edgeable about household and community conditions. This population included Indigenous Banyoro and in- migrants, spanning subsistence and small-scale contract sugarcane farmers, non-farmers and landless commercial agricultural workers. The a priori target sample included five respondents in


each of the nine communities, totalling 45 interviews. We chose this sample size to ensure equal representation across all communities. Data saturation was met within the 45 in- terviews. We purposively sampled respondents to capture demographic and socio-economic variation by walking through each community (Supplementary Material 3). At the respondent’s request, we excluded one interview con- ducted in Kanyege from the study. We conducted an add- itional interview in Nyabigoma community as the third interview there was only partially completed (but was in- formative and so we retained this in the analysis). Accounting for this exclusion in Kanyege and addition in Nyabigoma, we conducted 45 semi-structured interviews, each lasting 118 min on average, in the nine communities during September–November 2019.


FIG. 2 The study area in Uganda, which includes Nyabyeya Parish and its nine communities, Budongo and Rwensama Forest Reserves, and the large-scale commercial sugarcane estates.


Data collection


We collected data through semi-structured interviews led by TP, following an interviewguide (SupplementaryMaterial 4). The interview guide included broad themes from the con- ceptual framework, in three sections. The first section asked respondents to describe important places, natural re- sources, livelihood and other activities and governance sys- tems (Ostrom, 2007). The second section asked about the major challenges and problems people experience in their lives (Narayan et al., 2000). Finally, we asked respondents how they felt when experiencing stressors, allowing them to introduce terminology related to distress in their own words. When respondents introduced such terms, we prompted them to provide details on associated symptoms. We covered all themes in all interviews (Supplementary Material 5).


Data analysis


We employed inductive thematic analysis to identify, ana- lyse, organize and report interview themes (following Braun & Clarke, 2006). The thematic analysis proceeded through the following five steps (Supplementary Material 6): (1) Familiarization with data, including re-reading tran- scripts and postscripts and comparing word clouds between demographic and social groups. (2) Generating codes and systematically applying them to the text over two rounds of coding. (3) Identifying and clustering codes into themes. (4) Reviewing themes, ensuring consistency within (but


Oryx, 2024, 58(5), 641–649 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323001710


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