Research Methods for Environmental Studies: A Social Science Approach

Abstract

to inquire into complex environmental issues. Author Mark Kanazawa asserts there has been a growing interest in environmental studies across colleges in the US, with many new programs focusing on environmental studies. This book is a resource well-suited for introductory educational purposes. It provides coherent and easily accessible accounts of research history and paradigms. It provides accessible examples of research questions and research projects from environmental studies. The author draws on his experience as an economist working in interdisciplinary research teams to highlight and provide examples of environmental research problems explored in disciplinary collaboration. The book consists of 19 chapters with content that roughly falls into three categories: quantitative research, methods for qualitative research, and themes that crosscut the qualitative/quantitative divide. The book includes basic methodological approaches of ethnography, spatial analysis, and GIS and approaches to data collection such as sampling, interviewing, and surveying. The book provides chapters on ethics and on writing a research proposal. The strength of the book is its accessibility, tone, and breadth. It provides a relevant historical framing of research methods and history of knowledge, describes a range of research methods, makes them accessible for student projects in environmental studies, and supports educators and students with suggestions for exercises and discussion points. The book has a friendly and easy-going tone and includes helpful boxes that frame essential learning points, including summaries of key points. For example, on page 3: “Bottom line: It took a series of scientists, doing painstaking research and building on previous scientific findings, to give us the knowledge of global warming that we have today.” The topics mentioned as potential research foci are “ongoing climate change, air, and water pollution, increasingly scarce freshwater resources, production of hazardous wastes, depleted natural resources, destruction of rain forests, habitat destruction, [and] growing lists of endangered species.”1 These are complex and dynamic phenomena of intraand intersystemic characters. They are wicked problems—problems with no easy solutions and problems typically characterized by disagreement among stakeholders about what has caused them, how they should be perceived and how we might handle them.2 The wicked nature of environmental problems forms the basis of a book critique. The presented methods aim at academic discussion and policy more than actual change-making for real-world impact. The book does not engage with designerly ways of producing knowledge through making, prototyping, or other cyclical, constructive, and generative processes. Nor with process-oriented design approaches such as participatory design. Students of technology, architecture, design, and engineering most likely will want to supplement the book with designand practice-oriented methods that teach one how to intervene in the world, work with stakeholders, communicate clearly, and practice creative problem-solving. These are all competencies of great importance when dealing with the wicked challenges. The chapter that comes closest to such approaches is on Action Research, a research method where knowledge creation processes are extended to cocreation and participatory approaches. In the description of Action Research, projects by both students and more senior researchers are described, which involve working with communities to identify and improve particular environmental issues through research, such as environment related health risks. The book passes over transdisciplinary research by subsuming it under the header of Interdisciplinarity. However, a significant feature of transdisciplinarity is that it engages with real-world actors in real-world situations. Transdisciplinary approaches excel in helping build competence to work with messy knowledge processes and productions. Education scholar Julie Thompson Klein connects transdisciplinarity with increasing awareness about a need for action in academic and scientific communities and connecting sciences of sustainability, climate change, environmental risk, and pollution in research that seeks to make a difference, seeking small and large-scale change that is ethically Research Methods for Environmental Studies: A Social Science Approach