Grantee Research Project Results
1997 Progress Report: Eliciting Environmental Values A Constructivist Approach
EPA Grant Number: R824706Title: Eliciting Environmental Values A Constructivist Approach
Investigators: Fischhoff, Baruch
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
EPA Project Officer: Chung, Serena
Project Period: October 1, 1995 through September 30, 1997 (Extended to September 30, 1998)
Project Period Covered by this Report: October 1, 1996 through September 30, 1997
Project Amount: $99,987
RFA: Valuation and Environmental Policy (1995) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Environmental Justice
Objective:
There is increasing demand for thoughtful, systematic public input to environmental decision making. This demand can be found in the citizen participation components of EPA's efforts toward environmental justice and risk prioritization. It can be found in the attempts by EPA's Science Advisory Board and staff to survey public opinion for the report Unfinished Business and subsequent internal priority setting. And, it can be found in the need to assign dollar values to nonmarket environmental changes when setting regulatory standards. Unfortunately, the complexity and novelty of these public policy programs far outstrip the conventional uses of survey research, the research paradigm most frequently called upon to provide solutions. This project is part of an ongoing attempt to develop an alternative methodology.The research project has three foci: how to compose complex questions, how to help respondents to produce the best answers possible, and how to characterize the definitiveness of the resulting responses (so that they can be used responsibly in public policy making). Each focus has both a methodological and a substantive thrust. To that end, we use both theoretical and empirical approaches. The former include secondary analyses of existing studies, integrative essays, and conceptual analyses of key concepts. The latter include focus group discussions, structured open-ended interviews, and experiments.
Progress Summary:
We have implemented our alternative methodology in the context of a major public policy initiative (the BTU tax proposed early in the first Clinton Administration) and a specific environmental change (a river cleanup). We have found it possible to provide a full specification of these tasks using a framework for transactions that we proposed some years ago. We also found a willingness among citizens to participate actively in this process, as well as to probe sensibly the supplementary analyses that we made available to them. Our analyses show a mixed pattern regarding the kinds of sensitivity and insensitivity that one would want from a valid measurement technique.One focus of our experimental and theoretical work has been identification of the sources of magnitude insensitive valuation (the tendency to provide similar valuations to different quantities of a good). We believe that our results are inconsistent with several commonly offered explanations of these measurement anomalies. A second focus is on people's conceptualization of the effects of budgetary constraints on contributions to environmental goods. Our results suggest that people have an understanding of the general issue, which they then have difficulty applying in specific cases.
We believe that we are making progress toward producing a broadly applicable methodology that grapples with the problems of the reactive measurement needed for complex, novel problems. This work brings into relief various (interesting) theoretical questions concerning how evaluation tasks (for environmental goods and others) can be formulated, understood, and completed.
Future Activities:
We plan to continue work on each of these topics, with a particular focus on the problems of specifying the set of possible competing demands for environmental contributions and the strategies people use for conceptualizing the environment as a good.Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 10 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
RFA, Scientific Discipline, Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Ecology, Economics, Ecology and Ecosystems, decision-making, Social Science, Economics & Decision Making, alternative compensation, compensation, contingent valuation, ecosystem valuation, policy analysis, social psychology, surveys, surface water policy, risk reduction, social impact analysis, valuation, decision analysis, economic benefits, environmental assets, incentives, public issues, valuing environmental quality, cost benefit, economic incentives, environmental values, information dissemination, market valuation models, preference formation, standards of value, constructivist approach, environmental policy, industrial accounting, community-based, psychological attitudes, public values, public policy, willingness to pay, interviews, cost effectiveness, economic objectives, multi-criteria decision analysisProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.