Genius at stating the obvious

The human dimensions of wildlife conservation is a “new” field in the general scope of things and is ostensibly the psychological aspect of wildlife conservation. Human dimensions research actually encompasses many different things, from public policy to the Thoreau-type “love of nature”. What I study in all of this is human attitudes and reactions toward wildlife and the policies put in place to protect that wildlife.

By definition human dimensions of wildlife conservation research should be interdisciplinary; a merging of pyschology, sociology, political science, and ecology. It turns out that human dimensions research suffers from the same problems as most fields in academia; interdisciplinary research is hard! Many research projects would be better served if they used theory and practice from other fields in their work, but, because of many things (politics, lack of expertise, fear of “the scoop”), this doesn’t always happen. Case in point: attitudinal research in human dimensions. This research surveys stakeholder opinions and attitudes about a planned policy or initiative regarding wildlife conservation. Stakeholders can be citizens that might be affected by the new policy, animal rights activists, business owners, or anyone who might have some “stake” in either the way things are now or the way they would be after the policy was implemented. These surveys are important since GOs and NGOs have found (often the hard way) that if the public is not behind the policy it can cost a lot of money, time, and heartache. By assessing a groups’ feelings about the policy these organizations can predict people’s reactions to the policy and make decisions accordingly. Makes sense to me!

But it doesn’t make sense to people a hell of a lot smarter than me, which brings me to a paper I recently read on attitudinal research in wildlife conservation which brought up the obvious point; attitudes by themselves do not necessarily predict behavior. So all these papers, and there are a LOT of them (I hope to review the lion share in my next post), which propose to predict stakeholders’ reactions based on attitudinal surveys seem to be missing the point. The paper goes on to point out that social psychologists have created theoretical models and ways of surveying that can get closer to predicting behavior then simply surveying attitudes alone.

There are two major models discussed. The first is the TRA (Theory of Reasoned Action) model: an expectancy model based on people attitudes towards the act of the thing instead of the thing itself coupled with the type of social pressures that they feel surround that act. For example: instead of asking one’s attitudes toward conserving natural resources, the TRA would ask one’s attitude towards recycling and whether one thinks that others would approve of the action of recycling. If the person’s attitude toward recycling is favorable and he believes others would approve of him recycling then he is likely to recycle according to the TRA. The major problem with the TRA is that the questions need to be so specific that you’re likely to end up with a 100 page survey.

A category of models which may solve this problem are ABPMs (Attitude-to-behavioral process models). These models deal with the accessibility of an attitude. Attitudes towards behaviors are more accessible the more times the behavior has been done in the past. So, a person who has a favorable attitude toward recycling and who has recycled many times in the past is more likely to recycle than a person who has the same favorable attitude toward recycling but has never recycled before. The problem with this model is that many conservation programs may be completely new, allowing no chance to measure how accessible an attitude is.

Still, either one of these models would get us closer to understanding how people would really react to new policies meant to protect wildlife.

Summer Reading List: McCLEERY RA, DITTON RB, SELL J, LOPEZ RR (2006) Understanding and Improving Attitudinal Research in Wildlife Sciences. Wildlife Society Bulletin: Vol. 34, No. 2 pp. 537–541

~ by hominidae on July 11, 2008.