Revealing research preferences in conservation science J AS PER MONTAN A,CHRI S SANDBRO OK,ELLEN ROB E RTSON and MEL ANI E RYA N


Abstract Conservation researchers are increasingly draw- ing on a wide range of philosophies, methods and values to examine conservation problems. Here we adopt methods from social psychology to develop a questionnaire with the dual purpose of illuminating diversity within conservation research communities and providing a tool for use in cross-disciplinary dialogue workshops. The questionnaire probes the preferences that different researchers have with regards to conservation science. It elicits insight into their motivations for carrying out research, the scales at which they tackle problems, the subjects they focus on, their beliefs about the connections between nature and society, their sense of reality as absolute or socially constituted, and their propensity for collaboration. Testing the questionnaire with a group of 204 conservation scientists at a student confer- ence on conservation science, we illustrate the latent and multidimensional diversity in the research preferences held by conservation scientists. We suggest that creating oppor- tunities to further explore these differences and similarities using facilitated dialogue could enrich the mutual under- standing of the diverse research community in the conserva- tion field.


Keywords conservation social science, interdisciplinary research, preferences, questionnaire, reflexivity, research design, social psychology


Supplementary material for this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S003060531900067X


Introduction


work across disciplinary boundaries, think at multiple scales, and engage with diverse stakeholders. A growing awareness of the social and political dimensions of


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JASPER MONTANA (Corresponding author) School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK E-mail jasper.montana@ouce.ox.ac.uk


CHRIS SANDBROOK Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK


ELLENROBERTSON Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, UK


MELANIE RYAN Luc Hoffmann Institute,WWFInternational, Gland, Switzerland


Received 17 December 2018. Revision requested 10 April 2019. Accepted 4 June 2019. First published online 22 October 2019.


esponding effectively to the unabated loss of species and ecosystems requires conservation researchers to


biodiversity loss has shifted conservation science from a discipline dominated by the natural sciences into a multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary endeavour (Mascia et al., 2003; Sandbrook et al., 2013; Bennett et al., 2017). Conservation scientists are adopting a more diverse range of approaches and are increasingly collaborating across dis- ciplines to respond to conservation problems (Colloff et al., 2017). However, working across disciplines in conservation has known conceptual challenges, including competing the- ories of knowledge, disciplinary prejudices and difficulties in interdisciplinary conversation (Fox et al., 2006; Adams, 2007; Eigenbrode et al., 2007; Sievanen et al., 2012; Pooley et al., 2014; Bennett et al., 2016). Overcoming these requires an investment in initiatives that improve mutual under- standing of disciplinary diversity (Campbell, 2005). As conservation science becomes increasingly pluralist in its methods, there is therefore scope for experimenting with new ways to examine diversity and thereby find common meaning across interdisciplinary teams. The field of social psychology may offer some insight.


Scholarship in psychology has been increasingly recognized for its potential to contribute to conservation research and practice (Saunders et al., 2006; Selinske et al., 2018). Work in this field to date has focused on the attitudes, and to a lesser extent behaviours, of societies and stakeholders with respect to conservation (St John et al., 2010). However, there is also scope for the tools of social psychology to be brought to in- vestigate the attitudes and behaviours of research communi- ties. Scholars from the philosophy of science have previously developed and tested approaches to overcome disciplinary divides in the environmental sciences. A previously devel- oped toolbox for philosophical dialogue, for example, offers an approach to probing personal attitudes towards research and generating philosophical dialogue within research teams through responding to and discussing a set of open-ended questions (Eigenbrode et al., 2007). This toolbox approach has been widely tested in toolbox workshops, in which re- search collaborators are encouraged to share and discuss their conceptual worldviews with collaborators (O’Rourke & Crowley, 2013). However, the toolbox approach is a team- based method that requires a diversity of participants to be in the room and to engage sufficiently with the activity to support its success. Furthermore, it is predicated on quali- tative and interpretive methods, which may not align with the expectations of some participants more accustomed to quantitative approaches. Here we set out to examine the potential for developing a conservation-specific tool that could analyse diversity


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(3), 404–411 © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S003060531900067X


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