Revealing research preferences 405
quantitatively within the conservation research community and also be used to help multi-disciplinary teams of conser- vation researchers understand each other better. Drawing on methods from social psychology and building on insight from the toolbox approach, we develop a questionnaire that reveals research preferences in conservation science. Research preferences are understood as the personal atti- tudes held by researchers with regards to the conduct of their research. In the field of psychology, such attitudes are understood to define the way people form subjective understandings of the world around them and how that understanding is reflected in behaviour (Eiser, 1986). The use of questionnaires to probe the relationship between attitudes and behaviour has been widely applied in busi- ness management settings, through approaches such as personality-type questionnaires that examine how prefer- ences manifest in different workplaces (Blackford, 2010; Bridges, 2010). Bringing these approaches to the field of conservation science, we develop a short questionnaire that 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. The questionnaire can be used by individual researchers for personal self- reflection or to analyse diversity within large groups, and can be combined with facilitated dialogue to support mutual understanding within cross-disciplinary teams.
Methods
This research was carried out in two interlinked stages dur- ing January–April 2017. In the first stage we developed and validated a questionnaire (also known as a psychometric scale) to discern research preferences (factors in psycho- logical terms) within a conservation community. To do so we used written questions to identify a respondent’s prefer- ences for different approaches to conservation research. The second stage used the results to examine the relationship be- tween these research preferences and the self-identification of respondents as natural and/or social scientist.We analysed the questionnaire results and demographic data within the sample population, composed mostly of participants at the Cambridge Student Conference on Conservation Science. We identified an initial set of broad behaviours or atti-
tudes to conservation research from literature and explora- tory interviews with researchers in conservation science selectively sampled from zoology, geography, plant sciences, and history and philosophy of science. This process yielded a list of six possible factors of interest that reflected beha- viours or attitudes towards conservation research (Table 1).
Firstly, as in all fields (Eigenbrode et al., 2007), conserva-
tion researchers are guided by particular motivations that relate to the aims driving their work. Conservation science is often described as a mission-driven discipline (Meine et al., 2006; Mace, 2014) in which research is generally directed towards actions that ‘establish, improve or main- tain good relations with nature’ (Sandbrook, 2015,p. 565). However, there are likely to be differences in the extent that conservation researchers are motivated by achieving conservation outcomes or other kinds of impact. Outcomes and impact are broad concepts, and will be interpreted differently by different researchers. They could range from conceptual outcomes, such as changing the way issues are theorized, to substantive ones, such as changing a specific conservation practice. Such motivations sit alongside other reasons for doing research such as curiosity or professional development. Secondly, conservation research often involves methods
that conform to particular scales of analysis, from the global to the local (Margulies et al., 2016). Research may focus on synthesis research or seek to identify generalizable trends, or it may closely examine case studies to identify localized specifics (Cox, 2015). These tendencies between the general and the specific are likely to reflect distinct beliefs about the universalism of science and the localized contingency of research (Douthwaite et al., 2003; Sutherland et al., 2017). Thirdly, as the field of conservation science has dev-
eloped there have been notable shifts in the framing of conservation science with regards to the relative focus direc- ted towards people and nature (Mace, 2014). Depending on their personal and institutional backgrounds, conservation researchers are therefore likely to have distinct preferences for dedicating their attention to species and ecosystems, or humans and their institutions. Fourthly, alongside the focus of research, there are
variations in the way researchers view the relationship between the traditional categories of nature and society. Increasingly, the concept of socioecological systems is a prominent framework for thinking about the interconnect- edness between social and ecological systems in environ- mental management (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Díaz et al., 2015). In parallel, social theory has sought to break down the dualism of nature and society by emphasizing the hybrid networks of humans and non-humans that underpin both domains (Latour, 1993; Whatmore, 2002). Hence, there is likely to be variation amongst researchers about the extent to which nature and society are seen as hybridized or clearly distinct domains. Fifthly, extensive research in the philosophy of science
has examined the alternative worldviews that lead some researchers to believe in the existence of an external reality that is knowable through scientific research, and others who accept the existence of many local socially constituted real- ities existing in the minds of different people (Proctor, 1998).
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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