Doctoral Dissertation Research: Public Beliefs and Responses to Industrial Sites

博士论文研究：公众信念和对工业场地的反应

• 批准号: 1602248
• 负责人: Michael Macy
• 金额: $ 1.11万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-03-15 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1602248&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Public; Beliefs

Public responses to industrial projects shape the distribution of health and environmental risks within society. They also influence the social acceptance, government regulation, and economic viability of new technologies and industries. This dissertation uses the context of the unfolding boom in gas and oil production enabled by hydraulic fracturing technology to investigate how alternative conceptions of the risks and benefits of industrial projects structure the mobilization of public opposition and support. First, the research distinguishes between NIMBY ("Not in my backyard") opponents who mobilize on the basis of perceived local impacts, and ideological opponents who react to the industry from a larger set of political beliefs and values. Second, the researchers examine support for industrial siting that has received little attention in existing scholarship. The project introduces public comments as a new source of data for measuring public opinion. The project has potentially important implications for understanding political dynamics behind decisions to site and expand a rapidly-growing industry. The methods used for this study should be broadly applicable to other areas of study that can benefit from "big data."Current energy development in the United States brings renewed social science to explain public reactions to industrial siting. This research tests "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) against a complementary explanation of public response to industrial siting based on residents' ideological commitments to help to reconcile inconsistent empirical findings about the relationship between proximity and opposition. The project will examine 91,000 public comments submitted during the regulatory reviews of hydraulic fracturing in two states, Illinois and New York. First, researchers will generate a comprehensive mapping of the relationship between geographic proximity and mobilization for and against proposed hydraulic fracturing projects. Second, the researchers will combine the comments with measures of community context and with individual-level measures of ideology to evaluate competing explanations of mobilization for, and against, industrial siting in a series of statistical analyses. Finally, as a direct test of the proposed theoretical mechanism, the researchers will use natural language processing techniques to code the body of comments for the different ways that commenters talk about hydraulic fracturing. For research on industrial siting, public comments data offer three specific advantages: (1) they offer a behavioral measure of opposition and support of an industry (2) they are geocoded, allowing for precise measurement of a commenter?s proximity to proposed industrial sites, and (3) the text of public comments gives unprecedented insight into the different conceptions that people develop of industry impacts. The results of the analysis, especially the relative effects of proximity and political ideology, may have implications for understanding the dynamics of other policy debates. Finally, the proposed project will demonstrate innovative approaches based on natural language techniques and machine learning concepts to studying these dynamics using existing public records, as well as the use of rigorous multiple methods.

公众对工业项目的反应塑造了社会内健康和环境风险的分布。它们还影响新技术和行业的社会接受，政府监管和经济可行性。该论文利用液压压裂技术实现的天然气和石油生产中展开的繁荣的背景来研究工业项目风险和利益的替代概念如何构建动员公众反对和支持。首先，该研究区分了基于当地影响的基础动员的Nimby（“不在我的后院”）对手，以及对行业反应的意识形态反对者与更大的政治信仰和价值观的反应。其次，研究人员研究了对工业选址的支持，而工业选址在现有奖学金中几乎没有关注。该项目将公众评论作为衡量公众舆论的新数据来源。该项目对理解决策背后的政治动态具有潜在的重要意义，以扩展站点和扩大快速发展的行业。本研究使用的方法应广泛适用于可以从“大数据”中受益的其他研究领域。美国当前的能源开发带来了新的社会科学，以解释公众对工业定位的反应。这项研究测试了“ Nimby”（不在我的后院），反对基于居民的意识形态承诺，以协调对接近与反对之间关系的不一致的经验发现，对公众对工业的反应的补充解释。该项目将审查在伊利诺伊州和纽约两个州的水力压裂调查期间提交的91,000条公众意见。首先，研究人员将对拟议的液压压裂项目和反对的地理距离和动员之间的地理距离和动员之间的关系进行全面的映射。其次，研究人员将在一系列统计分析中，将评论与社区环境的度量以及个人意识形态的度量相结合，以评估对工业地位的动员和反对工业地位的竞争解释。最后，作为对拟议的理论机制的直接测试，研究人员将使用自然语言处理技术为评论者谈论水力压裂的不同方式编码评论的主体。对于工业选址的研究，公众评论数据提供了三个具体优势：（1）它们提供了对行业的反对和支持的行为衡量（2），它们是地理编码的，可以精确地衡量评论员与提出的工业网站的邻近性，（3）公众评论的文本对不同的概念的概念产生了不同的概念，从而发展了各个行业的概念。分析的结果，尤其是接近性和政治意识形态的相对影响，可能对理解其他政策辩论的动态有影响。最后，拟议的项目将基于自然语言技术和机器学习概念来展示创新的方法，以使用现有公共记录以及使用严格的多种方法来研究这些动态。