Citation:

Weber, M. Santa Cruz River Options. Presented at "Ecosystem Valuation Workshop".

Impact/Purpose:

This presentation will be made to a number of environmental valuation researchers convening over the issue of what environmental attributes to include in stated preference valuation surveys. I will be presenting my experience with qualitative research (focus groups and interviews) on this question.

Description:

This presentation summarizes qualitative research insights gained during development of a nonmarket valuation survey for changes to the Santa Cruz River in Southern Arizona. Qualitative research provides an important avenue for understanding how the public interprets valuation surveys to minimize sources of bias, including identifying the ecological feature actually being valued as perceived by respondents. Thus far, three phases of qualitative data collection have occurred: 20 one-on-one interviews based on a sample of convenience of regional river stakeholders; 10 focus groups involving 71 persons recruited from a cross-section of the Santa Cruz Watershed population (focusing on Tucson); and 17 one-on-one survey pretests with persons recruited from a cross-section of Tucson. The "Final Ecosystem Goods and Services" (FEGS) concept, attributable to Boyd and Banzhaf (2007), provided a strategy for the qualitative phase and for defining nonmarket attributes featured in the survey instrument. In our experience, utilizing the FEGS concept in focus groups and interviews helped focus the discussion, but also raised a number of challenges. We describe several thematic challenges encountered in identifying FEGS: Boundaries - i.e. what defines a stream; Vision - referring to participants' varying capacity to envision potential environmental changes; Information - to cover topics such as environmental literacy, misinformation, and unknown consequences; Tradeoffs - i.e. how thinking about tradeoffs inhibits establishing a full wish-list of FEGS; Specifics - the usefulness of FEGS in helping participants break apart comments such as "healthy ecosystem", "clean"; and Refusal - some participants preferred to entrust environmental issues to experts. Overall, we found the most challenging aspects of the FEGS approach to be the extent to which FEGS were themselves proxies. For example, in the study region water supply for human consumption is a

Record Details: