To date, cross-sectional research on public attitudes to shale gas has predominated, with little detail on how attitudes might vary across geographical areas or evolve over time. We will address the following questions:
- To what extent do public attitudes towards shale gas evolve over time in response to
specific events, and differ across geographical areas of the UK? - How do attitudes vary as a function of spatial proximity to shale gas development?
- What combination of socio-economic, political, environmental and social-psychological
factors explain spatial diversity in public attitudes? - What is the impact on public attitudes of alternative discourses, frames, and sources of
information, and how does this interact with existing beliefs?
A longitudinal design will be used to track public attitudes to shale gas over time. Drawing on
questionnaire survey and social media datasets, the influence of specific events (e.g. Brexit, local controversies, policy change) on public attitudes will be assessed. Integrating these datasets with the GIS framework devised in WP1, through multi-level statistical modelling, will provide a contextualized understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of public attitudes to shale gas.
Longitudinal survey data collection Three waves of survey data will be collected to
monitor public attitudes at nine month intervals, maximizing the capture of temporal variation within the project’s three-year duration. Oversampling at time 1 will ensure sufficient response at times 2 and 3 for statistically significant comparisons across waves. The sample will be representative of the UK population based on age, gender, income and spatial distribution. An online panel survey will collect data on core questions repeated in each survey wave. These will capture general attitudes and understanding, support for and opposition to development, sources of information and trust in stakeholders, and associations of shale gas with whole systems issues of security, affordability and sustainability, including climate change.
To access a summary of results for the Wave 1 public attitude survey, click here.
Social media data collection The Twitter social media platform will be used to gain a
greater understanding of public attitudes to shale gas at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. A web based interface will enable automated collection of two subsets of tweet data: (i) tweets that have a location from where the message was sent (geotweets); (ii) the followers list from which a social network can be generated. Accessing a georeferenced dataset initiated in March 2015 that currently holds 600 million geotweets collected from across the UK, searches using hashtags and keywords will be conducted to identify twitter accounts that engage with the topic of shale gas.