Conference Proceedings

2008 Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section Inaugural Conference

Conference Venue: University of Leeds
Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section

From: 09 Feb 2008
To: 09 Apr 2008

 
Keynote Speaker(s)

The environment, Risk and Mixing-Methods

Nick Pidgeon
University of Cardiff


This paper will assess the role of mixed-methods social sciences research for investigating environmental risk issues: such things as nuclear power or climate change. Many real world global environmental risks pose an epistemological and ontological dilemma for researchers in that hazards can have real future consequences for people but we only have knowledge of their risks through constructed accounts. This paper will explore, with reference to recent examples, the ways in which qualitative and quantitative research can be usefully combined in such research contexts, together with some of the dilemmas and tensions that this brings

Biography
Professor Pidgeon joined the School of Psychology at Cardiff University on 1 February 2006. Before that he held a Chair in Environmental Risk at the School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, the UK’s foremost interdisciplinary environmental research institute. His research looks at how public attitudes, public trust and institutional responses form a part of the dynamics of a range of technological controversies, including those of Nuclear Power, Climate Change and GM Agriculture. He is active in giving advice in the science policy domain, making extensive use of large-scale surveys, focus groups and interviews. Since early 1990 he has been concerned, in a series of articles jointly with Dr Karen Henwood, with the issue of why, and how, social psychology and social scientists more generally might benefit from wider use of both qualitative research and ‘mixed’ methodologies which cross the quality/quantity divide. Most recent publications on this topic have included in the very first American Psychological Association handbook of qualitative methods and a major Sage handbook of approaches to data analysis.