Transcript Values: dollars, trees or feelings?

Values: dollars, trees or feelings?
Denise Dillon, JCU
BEST EN Think Tank IX, James Cook University
June 16 2009
What are values?
• Economics
– Quantifiable, monetary exchange rates
– Natural capital
• Natural sciences
– Quantifiable, environmental attributes, processes
• Social sciences
– Qualitative, foundational to human attitudes &
behaviour
• Tourism – all of these?
World Heritage Values
• ‘outstanding, universally
valuable examples of
natural and cultural
heritage’
• Wet Tropics World
Heritage Area and Great
Barrier Reef Marine Park
are tourism ‘drawcards’
• Are values ‘in’ the
environment or within
human appreciation of
environmental attributes,
features & processes?
www.queenslandholidays.com.au
Language in use
• Profound effect of language on how
individuals view and understand the world
• Profound influence of language on how
individuals construct their own realities
• To understand the role of ‘values’ in practices
must consider the range of interpretations
available to stakeholders
Language of environmentalism
• Stakeholders active in World Heritage Areas
include social scientists, environmental
scientists, environmental managers,
economists, tourism operators, local
residents, freeholders, indigenous owners,
activists, tourism operators, tourists …
• A study of language use requires a real world
context and a suitably representative sample
of language
Method for text analysis
• Group selection
– Wet Tropics Management Authority, WTMA
– Rainforest Cooperative Research Centre, CRC
– Cairns and Far North Environment Centre, CAFNEC
• Groups actively involved in discussion of
environmental matters in the Wet Tropics
World Heritage Area
– Similar missions & goals but different primary
focus
Method for text analysis
• Document selection
– Archived documents available to and targeted
towards the public
– Newsletters, reports, information sheets
• Initial search for occurrences of the target
word ‘values’ or variants
• Documents with target word retained except
for those with >50 occurrences - discarded as
outliers
Type-token Relationships for the Sample
Documents and Three Group Sub-samples
Document
source
V
T
TTR
TTR'
TTR+TTR'
WTMA
CRC
1332
3670
6492
21736
0.21
0.17
0.82
0.82
1.02
0.99
CAFNEC
1895
4857
6519
34747
0.29
0.14
0.86
0.81
1.15
0.95
Combined
V = types; T = tokens; TTR = type/token ratio, V/T; TTR' = log type/token ratio, logV/logT
WTMA, n = 22; CRC, n = 28; CAFNEC, n = 18; Combined, n = 68
Keyword and Occurrence Counts for the Sample
and Three Sub-samples
Source
Document
count
Keywords
Count
Occurrences
Percent of
total
Count
Percent of
total
WTMA
CRC
22
28
778
1942
31%
77%
3073
10801
18%
64%
CAFNEC
18
68
1143
2512
45%
100%
3027
16901
18%
100%
Combined
Keyword percentages for the three groups do not sum to 100, as most
keywords were not unique to one group.
Preparing text units for analysis
• Select sufficient context while limiting extraneous
‘noise’
– Pseudoparagraphs constructed by selecting a
sentence containing each occurrence of the target
word plus one sentence preceding & one following
– Exclude function words (i.e. articles, prepositions),
retain content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs)
– Set frequency thresholds to exclude low frequency
items in relatively fewer documents
Shared vocabulary, but differences
WORLD HERITAGE
WORLD HERITAGE VALUES
ACTIVITY
LIST
RESEARCH
CRC
WORLD HERITAGE AREA
PLANT
CONTROL
HABITAT
SPECIES
FOREST
WATER
BIODIVERSITY PROJECT
EVALUATE
CULTURAL VALUES
WTMA
ENVIRONMENT
FUTURE
CONSERVATION
ENSURE
PEOPLE
HERITAGE
ECONOMIC
INCREASE
VALUE
RESOURCE
CAFNEC
NATURAL VALUES
PROTECTION
Impact of values on behaviour?
• Firstly we need to understand what values are,
in different contexts, for different people
• Values in tourism industry are measurable in
dollars BUT
• Values are also measurable as biophysical
characteristics of the environment AND
• Values are measurable within affective
responses to an environment