Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: quantitative surveys (Page 1 of 5)

Alex and Keahna at BoFEP

June 7, 2024 /

It’s summer conference season, and two team members have just been to St. Andrews, NB, for the joint Bay of Fundy Ecosystem Partnership/ACCESS conference. Keahna had the opportunity to present early survey results from her Petitcodiac causeway survey, and talk about the larger study of which it is a part. Alex talked about the qualitative data analysis he led from our recent survey of apartment residents around the Minas Basin to understand their perceptions of coastal adaptation options like raising dykes, removing them to restore tidal wetlands and managed dyke realignment. He got a runner-up award for his poster. Conferences like BoFEP that are focused on a landscape/seascape, rather than field of study, are wonderful opportunities for engaging across disciplines.

Keahna presented preliminary results from the Petitcodiac case of her IDPhD research.

Ever busy, Alex presented two posters at the same time, one on his work with ResNet and one on his upcoming MI thesis work.

New research note on understanding sense of place

June 6, 2024 /

Figure 1 in Cotton et al. 2024, explaining the process

Visiting PhD student Isabel Cotton joined my team and the ResNet project for 3 months last year,  from her home unit at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, and recently published a methods-oriented research note on that work in Journal of Environmental Psychology. The paper, Comparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research, shows the result of exploratory work we did with Bangor University linguistic scholar Thora Tenbrink that took a qualitative approach by contrast with most survey-based assessments of sense of place. We compared the results of inductive and search-term-based coding of a free-text survey question on a survey of Minas Basin house residents asking them to, “Please describe [their] local area, in terms of what it means to [them] personally and how [they] use it”. The two sets of categories varied in their correlation, with more tangible themes like recreation/experience, relational/family and cultural heritage/history the strongest across the methods, compared with less comparable themes about restorative environments and small-town identity. What was particularly interesting, however, was that it was possible using word clouds to identify new terms to allow the search-term approach to improve its performance significantly (for instance recreation went from 0.75 to 0.96 correlation by adding only one term, exercise; see above).

Climax thinking on the coast – new paper in Environmental Management

July 2, 2022 /

The experimental design for our 2019 focus groups, inspired by climax thinking

Happy finally to have the first paper out open access in Environmental Management from the SRES node of the SMU-led NRCan-funded Making Room for Movement project. This paper tells the results of the online (pre-COVID!) focus groups that we ran with coastal property owners back in summer 2019, and specifically, the impact of the experimental ‘priming’ treatments that MES Krysta Sutton and I applied. Framing is a more common idea than priming. In framing you design the message itself to be acceptable to your audience by emphasizing some aspects and de-emphasizing others. Priming is more like setting the stage: getting people thinking in ways that will allow difficult messages–like those about coastal adaptation and retreat–to later land productively. We used three experimental treatments based on the climax thinking framework, and tested the impacts quantitatively (using pre-post tests) and qualitatively (analyzing focus group discussions). Getting people thinking about future generations was most clearly effective, but it was also helpful to get people thinking about altruism in their community (past and present). This suggests some useful ways to engage with residents in areas faced by sea-level rise. Briefly: Don’t look backward, but forward to future generations, and outward to focus on the meaning in tackling shared challenges together.

Seeing is believing for solar

September 12, 2018 /

Energy Transitions collaborator and friend Dr. John Parkins has been in the news this week, talking about recent results published in Energy Policy about residential solar technology adoption in Canada. In the U of A news feed, Folio, John is quoted: “If you are immersed in an environment where these technologies are all around you, they become more familiar and doable”. This shows how important landscape norms are to our shared and individual sense of what is possible and desirable. He goes on to advocate more numerous and prominent installations of solar infrastructure in public buildings, to expedite the creation of norms that facilitate a transition to renewable energies like solar. View the great Global News interview with John here.

Angling for answers

July 24, 2017 /
Bilingual material about making space for shorebirds to rest this migration season.

Bilingual material about making space for shorebirds to rest this migration season.

As shorebirds start to arrive in the Bay of Fundy on their annual migration back south, it is a good time to report on our recent survey with striped bass anglers and outline our plans for the summer. We implemented an online survey with anglers who use key roosting sites in the Minas Basin, particularly ‘the Guzzle‘, to help us explore options for sharing beach space with migrating shorebirds at their high-tide resting period. This was in lieu of trying to assemble a workshop or focus group. The response was excellent, and we are now sharing the results here (PDF). On the basis of this feedback, and engagement with beach users in Avonport, our other key site, we have developed bilingual materials (above) that explain why, where and how to help shorebirds rest to ensure a successful migration back south: it’s a three-day trip over the Gulf of Mexico and they can’t swim! With anglers and other beach users we have identified lesser-used areas of each site to pilot setting aside at high tide for shorebird roosting, The back of the above card features a tide table that shows the times in August 2017 that we hope people will leave the sites for bird use, and signs at each place will explain further. We enjoyed this process of developing conservation ideas WITH beach users, many of whom are already great stewards of these birds. Space to Roost researcher Jaya Fahey will then be monitoring bird disturbance this year, as she did last year, and we’ll hope to see a difference.

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