Evaluating Social and Cultural Impacts: Decision Theory Meets Practice

发展往往被促进，因为它们有望给一个地区、州或民族带来经济或环境效益。然而，在某些情况下，这些相同的项目给当地居民带来了负面的社会、文化或健康后果。虽然这些影响是普遍和广泛的，但用于评估倡议的社会和文化影响（无论是积极的还是不利的）的方法受到的关注远远少于解决经济或环境影响的方法。原因包括经济学家或政策分析师通常以市场为基础的观点，以及在评估一个项目的广泛社会、文化或健康影响时遇到的实际挑战。该建议采用跨学科的观点，利用基于决策科学、环境风险分析、文化人类学、规划和政策评估以及心理学和统计学的方法，更好地衡量社会、文化和健康影响。基本的前提是，对不太明显影响的改进措施将需要改进分析和审议方法。关键任务包括更好地理解和识别社会和文化影响，更好和更广泛接受的度量标准，以结合这些影响的定性或定量测量，以及将成功解决不确定的未来影响、累积效应和社区范围价值（与当前方法所青睐的个人价值相比）的新方法。这项为期两年的提案首先与经验丰富的专家进行结构化访谈，以引出常规纳入社会、文化和健康指标作为项目评估一部分的主要问题和障碍。第二阶段包括实验，将比较专家和公众参与者的反应，并由研究人员参与，作为联邦（或州）监管和管理政府机构正在进行的几个正在进行的案例研究的一部分。第三阶段是根据第一阶段专家的意见对项目结果进行审查和修订，然后通过论文和会议传播结果。该项目的成果将有助于分析人员更好地代表和评价影响评估中以社区为基础的保健、社会和文化组成部分，从而减少社会冲突的程度，并使公共政策举措得到更广泛的接受。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Developments are often promoted because they are expected to result in economic or environmental benefits to a region, state, or nation. In some cases, however, these same projects result in negative social, cultural, or health consequences to the local population. Although these impacts are common and widespread, methods used to assess the social and cultural effects of initiatives (either positive or adverse) have received far less attention than methods to address economic or environmental impacts. Reasons include the usual market-based perspective of economists or policy analysts and the practical challenges encountered when evaluating the broad range of social, cultural, or health effects of a project. The proposal takes an interdisciplinary perspective to construct better measures of social, cultural, and health effects using methods based in the decision sciences, environmental risk analysis, cultural anthropology, planning and policy evaluation, and psychology and statistics. The underlying premise is that improved measures of less tangible impacts will require improvements in both analytical and deliberative approaches. Key tasks include better understanding and identification of social and cultural impacts, better and more widely accepted metrics for incorporating qualitative or quantitative measures of these effects, and new methods that will successfully address uncertain future impacts, cumulative effects, and community-wide values (in contrast to the individual values favored under current approaches). This 2-year proposal begins with structured interviews with experienced experts to elicit key concerns and barriers to the routine inclusion of social, cultural, and health indicators as part of project evaluations. Phase 2 includes experiments, which will compare the responses of expert and public participants, and involvement by researchers as part of several ongoing case studies that are now being undertaken by federal (or state) regulatory and management government agencies. Phase 3 is a review and revision of project findings in light of the comments of experts drawn from Phase 1, and then the dissemination of results through papers and conferences.Outcomes of the project will help analysts to better represent and evaluate the community-based health, social, and cultural components of impact assessments, thereby leading to reduced levels of social conflict and more widely acceptable public policy initiatives.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.