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决定了健康和环境风险在社会中的分布。它们还影响着社会对新技术和新产业的接受程度、政府监管和经济可行性。本论文利用水力压裂技术实现的天然气和石油生产的蓬勃发展的背景下，研究工业项目的风险和收益的替代概念如何结构动员公众的反对和支持。首先，该研究区分了邻避（“不在我的后院”）的反对者，他们根据感知的当地影响动员起来，而意识形态的反对者则从更大的政治信仰和价值观出发对该行业做出反应。其次，研究人员研究了在现有的学术研究中很少受到关注的工业选址的支持。该项目采用公众评论作为衡量民意的新数据来源。该项目对于理解选址和扩大快速增长的行业决策背后的政治动态具有潜在的重要意义。本研究所使用的方法应该广泛适用于其他可以从“大数据”中受益的研究领域。“美国当前的能源发展带来了新的社会科学来解释公众对工业选址的反应。本研究测试“邻避”（不是在我的后院）对公众的反应，工业选址的基础上居民的意识形态承诺的补充解释，以帮助调和不一致的实证研究结果之间的关系接近和反对。该项目将审查在伊利诺伊州和纽约两个州对水力压裂进行监管审查期间提交的91，000份公众意见。首先，研究人员将生成一个全面的地图之间的关系地理接近和动员和反对拟议的水力压裂项目。其次，研究人员将联合收割机的评论与社区背景的措施，并与个人层面的意识形态措施，以评估竞争的解释动员，并反对，在一系列的统计分析，工业选址。最后，作为对所提出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对评论者谈论水力压裂的不同方式的评论主体进行编码。对于工业选址的研究，公众评论数据提供了三个具体的优势：（1）他们提供了一个反对和支持一个行业的行为措施（2）他们是地理编码，允许精确测量的评论者？的接近拟议的工业用地，和（3）公众意见的文本提供了前所未有的洞察到不同的概念，人们发展的工业影响。分析的结果，特别是邻近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，拟议的项目将展示基于自然语言技术和机器学习概念的创新方法，以使用现有的公共记录研究这些动态，以及使用严格的多种方法。