qualitative research about environmental issues

• Methodology
• Open access
• Published: 13 June 2019

Systematic reviews of qualitative evidence for environmental policy and management: an overview of different methodological options

• Biljana Macura   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4253-1390 1 ,
• Monika Suškevičs 2 ,
• Ruth Garside 3 ,
• Karin Hannes 4 ,
• Rebecca Rees 5 &
• Romina Rodela 6 , 7  

Environmental Evidence volume  8 , Article number:  24 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Qualitative research related to the human dimensions of conservation and environment is growing in quantity. Rigorous syntheses of such studies can help develop understanding and inform decision-making. They can combine findings from studies in varied or similar contexts to address questions relating to, for example, the lived experience of those affected by environmental phenomena or interventions, or to intervention implementation. Researchers in environmental management have adapted methodology for systematic reviews of quantitative research so as to address questions about the magnitude of intervention effects or the impacts of human activities or exposure. However, guidance for the synthesis of qualitative evidence in this field does not yet exist. The objective of this paper is to present a brief overview of different methods for the synthesis of qualitative research and to explore why and how reviewers might select between these. The paper discusses synthesis methods developed in other fields but applicable to environmental management and policy. These methods include thematic synthesis, framework synthesis, realist synthesis, critical interpretive synthesis and meta-ethnography. We briefly describe each of these approaches, give recommendations for the selection between them, and provide a selection of sources for further reading.

Qualitative research related to the human dimensions of conservation and environment is growing in quantity [ 1 , 2 ] and robust syntheses of such research are necessary. Systematic reviews, where researchers use explicit methods for identifying, appraising, analysing and synthesising the findings of studies relevant to a research question, have long been considered a valuable means for informing research, policy and practice across various sectors, from health to international development and conservation [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ].

The methodological development of systematic reviews took off in the 1980s, initially with a strong focus on the synthesis of quantitative data. The exploration of specific methods for qualitative synthesis started to grow a decade or so later [ 8 , 9 ]. Examples addressed questions related to the lived experience of those affected by, and the contextual nuances of, given interventions. The methodology for the synthesis of quantitative research appears to have been adapted for environmental management for the first time in 2006 and has been developing since [ 10 , 11 ]. However, guidance in the field for those producing or interested in working with qualitative evidence synthesis still does not exist.

To date, the vast majority of systematic reviews in environmental management are syntheses of quantitative research evidence that evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention or the impact of an activity or exposure [ 12 ]—here called systematic reviews of quantitative evidence. These typically aggregate relatively homogenous outcome measures from similar interventions or exposures to create a more precise and accurate summary estimate of an overall effect [ 13 , 14 ].

Current debates about systematic reviews of quantitative evidence in other fields point out that such reviews, while they address essential questions about the magnitude of effects or impacts, cannot help us answer other policy- and practice-relevant issues [ 15 , 16 ]. In addition, the complexity within studies on impacts of environmental actions or exposures, and in studies of environmental management initiatives, will mean that a simple aggregation of study findings will only mask important differences and enable us to predict very little about what might happen to whom (human or otherwise) in any set of given circumstances. Here we argue that qualitative evidence syntheses can add value to environmental research and decision-making. Systematic reviews that make use of qualitative research can provide a rigorous evidence base for a deeper understanding of the context of environmental management. They can give useful input to policy and practice on (1) intervention feasibility and appropriateness (e.g., how a management strategy might best be implemented? What are people’s beliefs and attitudes towards a conservation intervention? ); (2) intervention adoption or acceptability (e.g., what is the extent of adoption of a conservation intervention?; What are facilitators and barriers to its acceptability? ); (3) subjective experience (e.g., what are the priorities and challenges for local communities? ); and (4) heterogeneity in outcomes (e.g., what values do people attach to different outcomes? For whom and why did an intervention not work? ) [ 8 , 15 , 17 , 18 ].

In common with individual studies of quantitative research, individual qualitative studies may be subject to limitations, in terms of their breadth of inquiry, conceptual reach and/or methodology or conduct. Projects that systematically find, describe, appraise and synthesise qualitative evidence can provide findings that are more broadly applicable to new contexts [ 19 ] or explanations that are more complete [ 20 ]. Such qualitative evidence syntheses (QES) may stand alone, be directly related to a systematic review of quantitative evidence on a related question(s) or may be part of mixed methods multi-component reviews that aim to bring two distinct syntheses of evidence together.

In spite of its value, there is a limited discussion on the synthesis of qualitative research evidence in the environmental field and tailored methodological guidance could usefully address how to:

conduct syntheses of evidence so as to go beyond questions of effectiveness or impact;

use synthesis to identify explanations for and produce higher levels of interpretation of the phenomena under study;

include rich descriptive and often heterogeneous evidence from different research domains; and

combine and link qualitative and quantitative evidence.

The objective of this paper is to present a brief overview of different methodological options for the synthesis of qualitative research developed in other fields (such as health, education and social sciences) and applicable to environmental management practice and policy. A selection of sources for further reading, including those that expand on how to identify, describe and appraise evidence for QES is also included. Before describing the different synthesis options, we briefly explore the nature of environmental problems and management to explain the context for QES in this field.

The context of environmental policy, management, and research

Environmental and conservation problems are wicked, highly complex, and embedded in ecological as well as social systems [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. The complexity stems from several sources: (1) a high level of uncertainty; (2) large temporal and spatial scale; (3) cross-sectoral and multi-level spanning; and (4) the irreversibility of potential damages [ 25 , 26 ]. The loss of global biodiversity or changes in the global climate system [ 27 , 28 ] can illustrate this complexity: our knowledge about these systems is imperfect, a multiplicity of actors is associated with them (see, e.g., [ 22 , 25 ]); their impacts span from local to global levels and the damages potentially cannot be repaired [ 29 , 30 , 31 ]. On top of this, interventions to address these challenges are themselves often complex, in that they are made up of many interacting components and are introduced into and rely upon social systems for their implementation [ 32 ].

Instead, the dynamic nature and complexity of environmental problems, and their possible solutions call for the use and integration of scientific knowledge from several and different disciplinary domains. This need is reflected already in the interdisciplinary nature of environmental research that occurs at the level of theory, methods and/or data [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ]. Environmental research is frequently based on observational studies [ 37 ]. Studies are commonly developed around a well-defined theoretical and a geographical boundary, with the aim to develop a comprehensive understanding of the chosen phenomena. However, this means that such research produces highly heterogeneous evidence scattered across different contexts [ 38 ].

These issues related to the type and nature of environmental evidence imply that systematic review methods need to include a plurality of different approaches [ 39 ]. Adding qualitative and mixed methods evidence synthesis to the systematic review toolbox may be vital in cases where context is very important, complexity and heterogeneity is the norm, and where a more in-depth understanding of the views and experiences of various actors can help to explain how, why and for whom an intervention does or does not work [ 18 ]. These methods can further aid in the understanding of success and failure of environmental interventions through the analysis of implementation factors. Furthermore, they can also help in describing the range and nature of impacts, and in understanding unintended or unanticipated impacts [ 40 ].

What is qualitative evidence synthesis (QES)?

Qualitative evidence synthesis refers to a set of methodological approaches for systematically identifying, screening, quality appraisal and synthesis of primary qualitative research evidence. Various labelling terms have been used (see Box 1 ).

It should be noted here that QES is distinct from two other categories of reviews that have been labelled as ‘qualitative’. The first category contains narrative summaries of findings from studies with quantitative data. Here, the original intention was to use quantitative synthesis methods (e.g., meta-analysis) but that was not possible due to, for example, the heterogeneity between studies. Review authors in the second category have the intention to use a narrative approach to synthesis of quantitative data right from the start. Neither of these two review categories is discussed further here.

Box 1 Definitions and labels

Qualitative research refers to a wide range of different kinds of research studies that tend to collect and analyse qualitative data, to organise and interpret the results and produce findings that are largely narrative in form (see also [ 41 ]).

Qualitative data typically refers to textual data (although other types of data, such as visual data, can be produced during the research process). Data are obtained through recording of, for example, e.g., individual or group interviews, or observations of behaviours.

Qualitative evidence synthesis (QES) is an umbrella term that encompasses a set of various methodological approaches for systematically identifying, screening, quality appraising and synthesising primary qualitative research evidence.

Other generic terms used for qualitative evidence synthesis:

Systematic review of qualitative research

Qualitative systematic reviews

Meta-synthesis

Qualitative research synthesis

An overview of QES approaches

In common with methods for systematic reviews of quantitative evidence, there are a number of stages of the systematic review process which are followed in most QES approaches, including (1) question formulation, (2) searching for literature, (3) eligibility screening, (4) quality appraisal, (5) synthesis and (6) reporting of findings. However, the methods used within each of these stages varies, depending on the specific review approach adopted with its epistemology and relation to theory.

QES approaches lie on an epistemological continuum between idealist and realist positions and can be positioned anywhere between the two extremes ([ 16 , 42 , 43 ], see Fig.  1 ). Idealist approaches to synthesis operate under the assumption that there is no single ‘correct’ answer, but the focus is in understanding variation in different conceptualisations [ 43 ]. They are less bound by pre-defined procedures and have open review questions allowing for constantly emerging concepts and theories [ 44 ]. In these iterative approaches, any stage of the review process may be revisited as the ideas develop through interaction with the evidence base. The iterations are recorded, described and justified in the write-up. These approaches may aim to create a model or theory that increases our understanding of what might hinder or facilitate the uptake of a policy or a program, or how a phenomenon operates and is experienced. Approaches on the realist side of the continuum assume that there is a single independent and knowable reality, and review findings are understood as an objective interpretation of this reality [ 43 , 45 ]. The review questions are closed and fixed, and the reviews follow strict formal linear methodological procedures. These approaches usually aim to test existing theories ([ 43 ], see Fig.  1 ).

(Source: Gough et al. [ 43 ])

Dimensions of difference in review approaches

QES approaches may also vary in the way they address and understand the importance of the context and so, they can be multi-context or context-specific. Multi-context reviews aim at an exhaustive sampling of literature to include diverse contexts, e.g., different geographical, socio‐cultural, political, historical, economic, ecological settings. Such reviews are currently common in systematic reviews of quantitative evidence. Context-specific QES use selective sampling and focuses on only one context to provide specific understanding to a targeted audience and develop theories that are specific to the local setting (see [ 46 ]).

In the following sub-sections, we give an overview of five commonly used qualitative synthesis methods: thematic synthesis, framework synthesis, realist synthesis, critical interpretative synthesis and meta-ethnography [ 47 , 48 ]. Table  1 shows the main purpose of the method, a type of the review question and a type of evidence commonly used in the synthesis stage (qualitative or mixed) and key readings. Anyone wanting to undertake a review should keep in mind that each method might imply a specific approach to review stages (from literature search to critical appraisal) and the key readings listed in Table  1 should be checked for specific advice.

• Framework synthesis

Framework synthesis uses a deductive approach and it has been used for the syntheses of qualitative data alone (e.g., [ 49 ]), as well as by those undertaking mixed methods syntheses [ 50 , 51 ]. Framework synthesis has been grouped along with other approaches that are less suitable for developing explanatory theory through interpretation or making use of rich reports in study findings. The approach can be seen as one means of exploring existing theories [ 42 ]. Framework synthesis begins with an explicit conceptual framework. Reviewers start their synthesis by using the theoretical and empirical background literature to shape their understanding of the issue under study. The initial framework that results might take the form of a table of themes and sub-themes and/or a diagram showing relationships between themes. Coding is initially based on this framework. This framework is then developed further during the synthesis as new data from study findings are incorporated and themes are modified, or further themes are derived. The findings of a framework synthesis usually consist of a final, revised framework, illustrated by a narrative description that refers to the included studies. The initial conceptual framework in framework synthesis is seen as providing a “scaffold against which findings from the different components of an assessment may be brought together and organise” ([ 52 ]:29). The approach builds upon framework analysis, which is a method of analysing primary research data that has often been applied to address policy concerns [ 53 ].

Six stages of framework synthesis are generally identified: familiarisation, framework selection, indexing, charting, mapping and interpretation. In the familiarisation stage reviewers aim to become acquainted with current issues and ideas about the topic under study. The involvement of subject experts in the team can be particularly helpful at this stage. The next stage, framework selection, sees reviewers finalising their initial conceptual framework. Here some argue for the value of quickly selecting a ‘good enough’ existing framework [ 52 ], rather than developing one from a variety of sources. An indexing stage then sees reviewers characterising each included study according to the a priori framework. In the charting stage reviewers analyse the main characteristics of each research paper, by grouping characteristics into categories related to the framework and deriving themes directly from those data. During the mapping stage of a framework synthesis, derived themes are considered in the light of the original research questions and the reviewer draws up a presentation of the review’s findings. The interpretation stage, as with much research, is the point at which the findings are considered in relation to the wider research literature and the context in which the review was originally undertaken.

Framework synthesis is relatively structured and therefore able to accommodate quite large amounts of data. Like thematic synthesis (see below), researchers using this method often seek to provide review output that is directly applicable to policy and practice. This method can be suitable for understanding feasibility and acceptance of conservation interventions. A variation of the method, the ‘best-fit synthesis’ approach, might help if funder timescales are extremely tight [ 54 ]. A review by Belluco and colleagues [ 55 ] of the potential benefits and challenges from nanotechnology in the meat food chain is a recent example of framework synthesis. Here reviewers coded studies to describe the area of the meat supply chain, using a pre-specified framework. Belluco’s team interrogated their set of 79 studies to derive common themes as well as gaps—areas of the framework where studies appeared not to have been conducted.

• Thematic synthesis

Thematic synthesis draws on methods of thematic analysis for primary qualitative research and is a common approach to qualitative evidence synthesis in health and other disciplines [ 56 ]. Examples in the literature range from more descriptive to more interpretative approaches. Findings from the included studies are either extracted and then coded or, increasingly, full-texts of the eligible studies are uploaded into appropriate software (e.g., NVIVO or EPPI-reviewer) and coded there. These codes are used to identify patterns and themes in the data. Often these codes are descriptive but can then be built up into more conceptual or theory-driven codes. Initial line-by-line descriptive coding groups together ideas from pieces of text within and across the included papers. Similarities and differences are then grouped together into hierarchical codes. These are then revisited, and new codes developed to capture the meaning of groups of the initial codes. A narrative summary of the findings, describing these themes is then written. Finally, these findings can be interpreted to explore the implications of these findings for the context of a specific policy or practice question that has framed the review. The method is therefore suitable for addressing questions related to effectiveness, need, appropriateness and acceptability of an intervention [ 16 ] and usually from the point of view of the targeted groups (e.g., local communities, conservation managers, etc.). Similar to systematic reviews of quantitative research, this method attempts to retain the explicit and transparent link between review conclusions and the included primary studies [ 56 ]. There are only a few examples of reviews in the environmental management field that have explicitly applied thematic synthesis. For instance, Schirmer and colleagues [ 57 ] use “thematic coding” [ 56 ] (within the approach they call qualitative meta-synthesis) to analyse the role of Australia’s natural resource management programs in farmers’ wellbeing. Haddaway and colleagues [ 58 ] use thematic synthesis to define the term “ecotechnology”.

• Meta-ethnography

This method was developed by Noblit and Hare [ 59 ] and originally applied to the field of education. The method was further improved in the early 2000s by Britten and colleagues [ 60 ] who applied it to health services research and has since been used for increasing numbers of evidence synthesis, particularly in health research and other topic areas.

Meta-ethnography is an explicitly interpretative approach to synthesis and aims to create new understandings and theories from a body of work. It uses authors’ interpretations (sometimes called second-order constructs, where the quotes from study participants are first-order constructs) and looks for similarities and differences at this conceptual level. It uses the idea of “translation” between constructs in the included studies. This involves juxtaposing ideas from studies and examining them in relation to each other, in order to identify where they are describing similar or different ideas.

This method includes seven stages: (1) identification of the intellectual interest that the review might inform; (2) deciding what is relevant to the initial interest; (3) reading the studies and noting the concepts and themes; (4) determining how the studies are related; (5) translating studies into one another; (6) synthesising translations; and (7) communicating review findings [ 59 ]. There are three main types of synthesis (stages 5 and 6): reciprocal translation, refutational translation, and line of argument. Different findings within a single meta-ethnography may contain examples of one or all of these approaches depending on the nature of the findings within the included studies. Reciprocal translation is used where concepts from different studies are judged to be about similar ideas, and so can be “translated into each other”. Refutational translation refers to discordant findings, where differences cannot be explained by differences in participants or within a theoretical construct. A line of argument can be constructed to identify how translated concepts are related to each other and can be joined together to create a more descriptive understanding of the findings as a whole. This method is therefore very well suited to produce new interpretations, theories or conceptual models [ 61 , 62 ]. In the conservation, this method could be used to understand how, for example, local communities experience conservation interventions and how this influences their acceptance of conservation interventions. Head and colleagues [ 63 ] used meta-ethnography to understand dimensions of household-level everyday life that have implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Critical interpretive synthesis

The critical interpretive synthesis approach was originally developed by Dixon-Woods and colleagues [ 64 ]. Review authors using this approach [ 64 ] are interested in theory generation while being able to integrate findings from a range of study types, and empirical and theoretical papers. Further, this method can integrate a variety of different types of evidence from quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods studies. We included critical interpretative synthesis in our paper because this method is often used for synthesis of qualitative evidence.

In the overall synthesis a coherent framework is usually presented, showcasing a complex network of interrelating theoretical constructs and the relationships between them. The framework partly builds on existing constructs as reported in the different studies and introduces newly derived, synthetic constructs generated through the synthesis procedure itself. Reported themes are then gradually mapped against each other to create an overall understanding of the phenomenon of interest. This is similar to developing a line of argument in a meta-ethnography (see above). Critical interpretive synthesis distinguishes itself from other approaches such as formal grounded theory [ 65 , 66 ] and meta-ethnography by adopting a critical stance towards findings reported in the primary studies, the assumptions involved, and the recommendations proposed. Rather than taking the findings for granted, review authors involved in critical interpretive synthesis “critically question the entire construction of the story the primary-level authors told in their research reports” [ 17 ]. They would potentially critique recommendations based on, e.g., ethical or moral arguments, such as the desirability of a particular rollout of an intervention. This method is therefore very well suited for understanding of what may have influenced proposed solutions to a problem [ 64 ] and to examine the constructions of concepts [ 67 ]. In the environmental field, this method could, for example, be applied to understand how different narratives influence environmental practice and policy or to critically assess new forms of conservation governance and management. Explicit examples of critical interpretive synthesis review projects applied to the broad area of environmental sciences are currently non-existent to our knowledge. However, there are a few related examples from health studies, such as review on environmentally responsible nursing [ 68 ]. In that review, authors justify the use of critical interpretative synthesis mainly by the ability of this method to synthesise diverse types of primary studies in terms of their topic and methodology.

• Realist synthesis

Realist synthesis is a theory-driven approach to combining evidence from various study types. Originally developed in 2005 by Ray Pawson and colleagues [ 69 ], it is aimed at unpacking the mechanisms for how particular interventions work, for whom and in which particular context and setting. It is included here because it is increasingly used for synthesising qualitative data, although data can be both qualitative and quantitative.

Realist synthesis has been developed to evaluate the integrity of theories (does a program work as predicted) and theory adjudication (which intervention fits best). In addition, it allows for a comparison of interventions across settings or target groups or explains how the policy intent of a particular intervention translates into practice [ 69 ].

The realist synthesis approach is highly iterative, so it is difficult to identify a distinct synthesis stage as such. The synthesis process usually starts by identifying theories that underpin specific interventions of interest. The theoretical assumptions about how an intervention is supposed to work and what impact it is supposed to generate are made explicit from the start. Depending on the exact purpose of the review, various types of evidence related to the interventions under evaluation (potentially both quantitative and qualitative) are then consulted and appraised for quality. In evaluating what works for whom in which circumstances, contradictory evidence is used to generate insights about the influence of context and so to link various configurations of context, mechanism and outcome. Conclusions are usually presented as a series of contextualised decision points. An example of a realist synthesis in the environmental context is the one from McLain, Lawry and Ojanen [ 70 ] in which the evidence of 31 articles examine the environmental outcomes of marine protected areas governed under different types of property regimes. The use of a realist synthesis approach allowed the review authors to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which mechanisms such as perceptions of legitimacy, perceptions of the likelihood of benefits, and perceptions of enforcement capacity interact under different socio-ecological contexts to trigger behavioural changes that affect environmental conditions. Another example from the environmental domain is the review by Nilsson and colleagues [ 71 ] who applied a realist synthesis to 17 community-based conservation programs in developing countries that measured behavioural changes linked to conservation outcomes. The RAMESES I project ( http://www.ramesesproject.org ) offers methodological guidance, publication standards and training resources for realist synthesis.

Choosing the appropriate QES method

Here we explain the criteria for the selection of different QES methods presented in this paper.

There are several aspects to be considered when choosing the right evidence synthesis approach [ 42 , 67 , 72 ]. These include the type of a review question, epistemology, purpose of the review, type of data, and available expertise including the background of the research team and resource requirements. Here, we briefly discuss the more pragmatic aspects to be considered. For a detailed discussion of other criteria we refer the reader to the work of Hannes and Lockwood [ 67 ], and Booth and colleagues [ 42 , 72 ].

Particularities of the evidence

As noted above, environmental problems are complex and involve a high degree of uncertainty. Environmental research is often inter- and transdisciplinary and involves, for example, the use of contested and/or diverse concepts and terms, as well as heterogeneous datasets. Thus, it is very important to understand if the QES method is fit-for-purpose and if it will result in the expected and desired synthesis outcomes. More complex and contextual outcomes are expected from the idealist methods (such as critical interpretative synthesis or meta-ethnography) (Fig.  1 and Table  1 ), which offer insights to policy or practice only after further interpretation. In contrast, more concrete and definitive outcomes can be expected from more realist methods (such as thematic synthesis) [ 67 ]. The type of evidence to be synthesised (e.g., qualitative or mixed, see Table  1 ) is yet another aspect needing consideration when choosing the synthesis method.

Background of the researchers and the review team

Researchers should consider their methodological backgrounds and epistemological viewpoints, to make sure they have appropriate expertise as well as experience in the review team when choosing the method. Some more complex methods (such as realist synthesis) may require specific skills (e.g., a familiarity with the realist perspective), and larger teams of researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds. Such methods may also require that the researchers are more familiar with the content of the research they review. Other methods (such as thematic or framework synthesis) can be done in a smaller team of researchers who do not necessarily have deeper subject expertise.

Resource requirements

Requirements for review funding will obviously depend on the resource requirements, i.e. a number of researchers to be involved, the time needed to conduct a review, costs associated with access to a specific data analysis or review management software, and access to literature. Some methods may be more resource demanding. Multi-component mixed method reviews, for example, requires expertise in both qualitative and quantitative synthesis methods, as well as the allocation of time for producing more than one parallel and/or consecutive syntheses. Other methods, such as framework synthesis, are maybe less resource-consuming (needing comparatively fewer people over less time) as long as initial frameworks have already been developed and are uncontentious. The issue of time spent on a review also depends on the breadth of the research question and the extent of the literature.

Challenges and points of contestation

Whilst QES can be valuable for environmental practice and policy, readers should be aware of several well-known challenges that might also appear problematic when QES approaches are used for the synthesis of environmental qualitative research. Here we summarise some of the most important ones including conceptual and methodological heterogeneity in primary research studies, issues with quality appraisal and transparency in reporting.

Qualitative evidence is likely to be situated in different disciplines, theoretical assumptions, and general philosophical orientations [ 73 ]. For aggregative less interpretative methods (such as framework synthesis), this poses a challenge in terms of comparability during the synthesis stage of the review process. In case of more interpretive approaches (e.g., meta-ethnography), such diversity is often seen as an asset rather than a problem as the translation of one study to another [ 74 ] allows for a comparison of studies with different theoretical backgrounds.

As with systematic reviews of quantitative evidence, critical appraisal of study validity is perhaps one of the most contested stages of the QES review process [ 75 ]. Quality appraisal (and the extent to which it matters) likely depends on the methodological approach. For example, framework and thematic syntheses assess the reliability and methodological rigour of individual study findings and may exclude methodologically flawed studies from the synthesis. Meta-ethnography or critical interpretative synthesis assess included studies in terms of content and utility of their findings, level to which they inform theory and include all studies in the synthesis [ 16 ].

Finally, reviews can be often criticised for lack of transparency and unclear or incomplete reporting. However, to ensure that all the important decisions related to the review conduct are reported at the sufficient level of detail, there are reporting standards applicable for QES such as ENTREQ [ 76 ] and ROSES [ 77 ]. Additionally, RAMESES are reporting standards developed specifically for realist syntheses [ 78 ] and the EMERGE project developed reporting standards for meta-ethnographies ([ 79 ], http://emergeproject.org ). These standards aim to increase transparency and hopefully drive up the quality of the review conduct [ 80 ].

Additional methodological options: Linking quantitative and qualitative evidence together

In the following paragraphs, we briefly present an additional methodological option that could be, for example, useful for the synthesis of complex conservation interventions and is suited to address some of the above challenges (such as methodological heterogeneity).

Namely, in some cases, synthesis of only one type of study findings (either qualitative or quantitative) might not be sufficient to understand multi-layered or complex interventions or programs typical for the environmental sector. The mixed methods review approach has been developed to link qualitative, mixed and quantitative study findings in a way to enhance the breadth and depth of understanding phenomena, problems and/or study topics [ 81 , 82 ]. Mixed methods reviews is a systematic review in which quantitative, qualitative and primary studies are synthesized using both quantitative and qualitative methods [ 81 ]. The data included in such a review are the findings or results extracted from either quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods primary studies. These findings are then integrated using a mixed method analytical approach [ 17 ].

This approach allows us to study how different (intervention) components are related and how they interact with each other [ 83 ]. Apart from studying the effectiveness of interventions, these reviews include qualitative evidence on the contextual influence, applicability and barriers to implementation for these interventions. For example, topics covered by reviews that link qualitative and quantitative data are the impact of urban design, land use and transport policies and practices to increase physical activity [ 84 ]; the socio-economic effects of agricultural certification schemes [ 85 ]; the impact of outdoor spaces on wellbeing for people with dementia [ 86 ]. Qualitative and quantitative bodies of evidence can point to different facets of the same phenomena and enrich understanding of it. In a review on protected area impacts on human wellbeing [ 87 ], it is revealed that qualitative findings were not studied quantitatively and only once combined in a synthesis these two evidence bases could provide a complete picture of the protected area impact.

Conclusions

Synthesis of qualitative research is crucial for addressing wicked environmental problems and for producing reliable support for decisions in both policy and practice. We have provided an overview of methodological approaches for the synthesis of qualitative research, each characterised by different ways of problematising the literature and level of interpretation. We have also explained what needs to be considered when choosing among these methods.

Environmental and conservation social science has witnessed an accumulation of primary research during the past decades. However, social scientists argue that there is a little integration of qualitative evidence into conservation policy and practice [ 33 ], and this suggests that there is a ‘synthesis gap’ (sensu [ 88 ]). This paper, with an overview of different methodological tools, provides the first guidance for environmental researchers to conduct synthesis of qualitative evidence so that they can start bridging the synthesis gap between environmental social science, policy and practice. Furthermore, introduced examples may inspire reviewers to adapt existing methods to their specific subject and, where necessary, help develop new methods that are a better fit for the field of environmental evidence. This is especially important as currently used methods in synthesis of environmental evidence fall short on utilising the potential of qualitative research that translates into lack of a deeper contextual understanding around implementation and effectiveness of environmental management interventions, and disregard the diversity of perspectives and voices (e.g., indigenous peoples, farmers, park managers) fundamental for tackling wicked environmental issues.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the BONUS Secretariat for covering article processing fees. BM thanks to Mistra Council for Evidence-based Environmental Management (EviEM) and BONUS RETURN for allocated time to draft this manuscript. RG is partially supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care South West Peninsula.

Article processing fees were covered by BONUS RETURN. BONUS RETURN project is supported by BONUS (Art 185), funded jointly by the EU and Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research FORMAS, Sweden’s innovation agency VINNOVA, Academy of Finland and National Centre for Research and Development in Poland.

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Biljana Macura

Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Kreutzwaldi 5, 51006, Tartu, Estonia

Monika Suškevičs

European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter Medical School, Truro, UK

Ruth Garside

Social Research Methodology Group, Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Karin Hannes

EPPI-Centre, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

Rebecca Rees

School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Södertörn University, 14189, Huddinge, Sweden

Romina Rodela

Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University, 6708 PB, Wageningen, The Netherlands

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BM and MS developed the framework for and edited the end version of this paper. All authors (BM, MS, RG, KH, R. Rees and R. Rodela) wrote substantial pieces of the manuscript. RG, KH, R. Rees and R. Rodela commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Macura, B., Suškevičs, M., Garside, R. et al. Systematic reviews of qualitative evidence for environmental policy and management: an overview of different methodological options. Environ Evid 8 , 24 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-019-0168-0

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• Critical interpretative synthesis
• Mixed methods reviews
• Qualitative evidence synthesis

Environmental Evidence

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Annual Review of Environment and Resources

Volume 48, 2023, review article, open access, advances in qualitative methods in environmental research.

• Holly Caggiano 1 , and Elke U. Weber 2
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; email: [email protected] 2 Department of Psychology and Public Affairs, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 48:793-811 (Volume publication date November 2023) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112321-080106
• First published as a Review in Advance on April 11, 2023
• Copyright © 2023 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Qualitative research methods examine a wide range of topics in the study of environment and resource management. This first review on the topic highlights innovative and impactful research over the past few decades, drawing from social science disciplines that include sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, public policy, and psychology. We describe qualitative research methods that have addressed five scientific goals: ( a ) describing what the world is like, ( b ) predicting what the world can be like, ( c ) acknowl-edging researcher positionality and reflexivity and diversifying ways of knowing in theorizing and research designs, ( d ) integrating imaginaries into empirical research and building narratives to make sense of possible futures and to broaden our view of scientific inquiry, and ( e ) helping scholars grapple with the deep complexity of socioecological systems. As we explore these themes, we explain foundational qualitative approaches and highlight examples of environmental qualitative research that apply them.

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The use of qualitative research to better understand public opinions on climate change

• Original Article
• Published: 06 June 2023
• Volume 13 , pages 367–375, ( 2023 )

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• Scott Kleinberg 1 &
• Anne H. Toomey   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4237-5842 1 , 2  

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The science and practice of climate change communication have significantly evolved over the last two decades, leading to a subfield of environmental communication focused on perception, awareness, and risk associated with climate change. This body of literature has demonstrated the importance of recognizing the differences among individuals and social groups in terms of cultural, psychological, and political reasons for their perceptions regarding climate change and has provided guidance for communicating with target audiences. However, most of the research in this subfield has relied on quantitative data from nationally representative survey instruments. While such metrics are essential to understanding longitudinal trends in public perceptions, they are limited in providing deeper understanding of how an individual perceives climate change in relation to other environmental and social issues. Qualitative data, elicited through techniques such as focus groups and semi-structured interviews, can help to provide these insights. In addition, qualitative research can support a more relational approach to climate change communication, which emphasizes the importance of seeing science communication as an opportunity to connect, rather than to persuade. In this paper, we present findings from semi-structured interviews (“environmental conversations”) with fifteen individuals based in the United States regarding their opinions, knowledge, and perceptions of climate change and other environmental issues. The findings demonstrate nuance and diversity in people’s opinions on climate change and how they are connected to other priorities and values. We recommend the value of qualitative research as a tool not only to better understand different environmental perspectives, but additionally to support two-way science communication among the broader public.

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Acknowledgements

This study benefited from support by Matthew Aiello-Lammens and Michelle Land. We would also like to thank the interviewees for their willingness to speak with us about their perceptions and beliefs.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Scott Kleinberg, with support from Anne Toomey. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Scott Kleinberg and all authors commented on previous and subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Kleinberg, S., Toomey, A.H. The use of qualitative research to better understand public opinions on climate change. J Environ Stud Sci 13 , 367–375 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-023-00841-w

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Qualitative research methods examine a wide range of topics in the study of environment and resource management. This first review on the topic highlights innovative and impactful research over the past few decades, drawing from social science disciplines that include sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, public policy, and psychology. We describe qualitative research methods that have addressed five scientific goals: (a) describing what the world is like, (b) predicting what the world can be like, (c) acknowledging researcher positionality and reflexivity and diversifying ways of knowing in theorizing and research designs, (d) integrating imaginaries into empirical research and building narratives to make sense of possible futures and to broaden our view of scientific inquiry, and (e) helping scholars grapple with the deep complexity of socioecological systems. As we explore these themes, we explain foundational qualitative approaches and highlight examples of environmental qualitative research that apply them.

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N2 - Qualitative research methods examine a wide range of topics in the study of environment and resource management. This first review on the topic highlights innovative and impactful research over the past few decades, drawing from social science disciplines that include sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, public policy, and psychology. We describe qualitative research methods that have addressed five scientific goals: (a) describing what the world is like, (b) predicting what the world can be like, (c) acknowledging researcher positionality and reflexivity and diversifying ways of knowing in theorizing and research designs, (d) integrating imaginaries into empirical research and building narratives to make sense of possible futures and to broaden our view of scientific inquiry, and (e) helping scholars grapple with the deep complexity of socioecological systems. As we explore these themes, we explain foundational qualitative approaches and highlight examples of environmental qualitative research that apply them.

AB - Qualitative research methods examine a wide range of topics in the study of environment and resource management. This first review on the topic highlights innovative and impactful research over the past few decades, drawing from social science disciplines that include sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, public policy, and psychology. We describe qualitative research methods that have addressed five scientific goals: (a) describing what the world is like, (b) predicting what the world can be like, (c) acknowledging researcher positionality and reflexivity and diversifying ways of knowing in theorizing and research designs, (d) integrating imaginaries into empirical research and building narratives to make sense of possible futures and to broaden our view of scientific inquiry, and (e) helping scholars grapple with the deep complexity of socioecological systems. As we explore these themes, we explain foundational qualitative approaches and highlight examples of environmental qualitative research that apply them.

KW - climate change

KW - environment

KW - participatory research

KW - qualitative methods

KW - research methods

KW - socioecological systems

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DO - 10.1146/annurev-environ-112321-080106

M3 - Review article

AN - SCOPUS:85168783129

SN - 1543-5938

JO - Annual Review of Environment and Resources

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• Published: 29 March 2022

Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people construct agency in relation to climate change

• Heidi Toivonen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6554-2228 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  102 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Environmental studies
• Language and linguistics

This study analyzes how people discursively construct their (non)agency—how they display abilities and capacities to act, or the lack thereof—vis-à-vis climate change. The paper presents the results of a detailed discursive and thematic analysis of 28 interview transcripts: 12 broad agency themes representing different ways of constructing human (non)agency in relation to climate change. The most common agency theme was Collective, followed by Individual, Critical, and Threatened agency. Climate change skepticism was displayed mostly within Critical agency, where the speakers presented themselves as intellectual and critically thinking individuals, drawing from scientific rhetoric while criticizing and misrepresenting climate science. The constructions of Collective agency emerged as a form of agency that displays a sense of meaningfulness related to socially embedded actions. The construction of agency in relation to climate change is very detailed discursive work, as people draw from multiple societal discourses to craft varied discursive positions of experiencing, knowing, and doing in relation to it. The paper suggests ways for climate communications to take into account these multiple themes of agency.

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Introduction.

Climate change presents a profound challenge to human agency (see e.g. the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, IPCC, 2022 ). It demands us to come to terms with humans having become a destructive geophysical agent causing changes in vast natural historical timescales (Chakrabarty, 2009 , 2012 ). Climate change might push people towards a sense of complete loss of agency, the feeling that there is nothing we can do (Braidotti, 2019 ), especially as the question of whether it is already too late to prevent dangerous climate change is discussed in serious science circles (Moser, 2020 ). The challenge of rethinking a realistic, multifaceted notion of human agency is ever more complex and pressing.

In this paper, I take a detailed, qualitative look at how people construct positions of (non)agency in relation to climate change. Presenting the results of a detailed language-oriented analysis of an interview study conducted with 28 interviewees representing 11 different nationalities, I show how they construct themselves as agents of feeling, knowing, and doing in relation to climate change. I take a critical stance to the overly individualistic and simplistic perspectives on the psychology of climate change action. I attempt to contribute to developing a wider understanding of agency, taking into account how collective discourses afford individuals to take various (non)agentic positions to climate change. Placing myself at the crossroads of climate psychology and science communications, I start with a concise review at relevant research literature from a variety of disciplines.

Climate change refers to the scientifically identifiable periodic modification of the climate of the Earth, persisting for an extended period and caused by various geologic, chemical, biological, geographic, and human factors (IPCC, 2019 ; Jackson, 2021 ). In contemporary language use as well as in this paper, in alignment with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the term refers to the warming trend spanning the entire 20th century and the first decades of 21st century, occurring in addition to natural climate variability and attributable directly or indirectly to human activities such as carbon dioxide emissions (IPCC, 2019 ; Jackson, 2021 ; UNFCCC, 2011 ).

A central notion in this paper is agency . Climate change debates anchor a variety of notions of human agency as being responsible of (or not) and able to mitigate (or not) climate change and its effects. Climate change education and communication have moved on from grappling with how to convince people that it is indeed human agency that is responsible for creating climate change and have increasingly directed their efforts at communicating about mitigation and adaptation possibilities. These are challenging tasks, not the least because climate change as a phenomenon tends to be experienced in Western countries as remote, invisible, and complex, yet its scientifically accurate presentations can also cause difficult and paralyzing feelings, counteracting any initiative to motivate people into action (e.g. Moser, 2010 ; Moser and Dilling, 2011 ; Monroe et al., 2019 ; Norgaard, 2011 ; Verlie, 2020 ). As climate communication is increasingly facing its tasks in the times of “it’s perhaps already too late”, further insights into how to understand human expressions of agency are needed.

Traditionally, agency has been defined as an internal psychological mechanism, capacity to act intentionally, also carrying the implications that an agent is separate from others, aware of their own actions, and able to reflect upon these deeds (Alkire, 2005 ; Harré, 1993 ; Kögler, 2010 ; Pope, 1998 ; Yamamoto, 2006 ). Recent work within environmental education has defined agency as “an individual’s perception of their own capability to author responses that effect change in the world” (Walsh and Cordero, 2019 ). Such a view of agency merely as “capability” to impact change in the world frames it as an internal attribute of a single human being and ties it into perceivable “external” impacts, thus narrowing what could potentially be understood as agency. Behaviorally oriented climate psychology, also dominated by this individualistic and overly rational view on human action, has led to the promotion of suboptimal, information-focused climate intervention strategies (Whitmarsh et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, the traditional Western notion of human agency as separate from and superior to nature, dispositioned to control it, is precisely the ideology that has justified the unlimited exploitation of the nonhuman world, leading to the current climate crisis (Adeney et al., 2020 ; Hoggett, 2019 ; Plumwood, 2009 ). Further need for finding alternative ways to understand human agency emerges from the fact that narrow conceptualizations of agency as human goal-directed activity might be suitable for quantitative survey purposes (Alkire, 2005 ) but are not alone sufficient to capture the variety in how people actually discuss their experiences of and actions in relation to climate change. Climate psychology, education, and communications have noted the need to go beyond understandings of the human as a logical agent taking rational action and the co-implied belief that people need to be informed better in order to help them take climate action (e.g. Hoggett, 2019 ; Moser and Dilling, 2011 ; Verlie, 2017 ).

Following a discourse analytical approach, agency is here understood not as a psychological attribute but as something discursively constructed in interaction (e.g. Toivonen et al., 2019 ; Toivonen, 2019 ). I define agency as the discursive attribution of a variety of aspects of being—ableness or the lack thereof both to oneself and to other humans in relation to climate change. Thus, I also take into account the phenomenon of ascribing nonagency—the construction of lacking or otherwise troubled being-ableness (Toivonen et al., 2019 ). To keep the approach to agency as open and flexible as possible, a dialogue with multiple ways of approaching climate change agency in other fields is needed.

A concept closely related to that of agency, albeit usually defined in a narrower manner, is that of efficacy . A central differentiation has been made between individual efficacy —individual’s belief in their capacity of mitigating climate change—and collective or group efficacy —belief in one’s ingroup or in the system as a whole being able to cooperate to take action on climate change (Chen, 2015 ; Fritsche et al., 2018 ; Hornsey et al., 2021 ; Roser-Renouf et al., 2014 ; van Zomeren et al., 2010 ). Bostrom et al. ( 2019 ) differentiate between personal self-efficacy and response efficacy (belief in the ease of taking a certain mitigation action versus its perceived impact) at the personal and at the collective level. The notion of participative efficacy beliefs , the beliefs that one’s own individual actions are a crucial contribution to collective climate action, seems especially promising (Bamberg et al., 2015 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ; van Zomeren et al., 2013 ). Efficacy research has given valuable contributions to our understanding, yet is limited to rather narrow definitions; to give an example, I argue that focusing on the perceived ease of taking a certain action captures only a glimpse of what agency can be, and eventually, is completely different from perceiving oneself as actually able or not to take that action.

Previous language-oriented research has demonstrated the staggering multiplicity of climate change views and experiences. Perceptions of climate change vary both within and between different societies (Christmann et al., 2014 ), building on different vocabularies and epistemologies, understandings of causality and reality, and approaches to science (O’Brien and Leichenko, 2019 ). It has been discussed for decades how the authority of science is diminishing in the mix of formal and informal scientific communications, nonexpert opinions, and dramatized media stories about climate change (Boykoff, 2008 ; Minol et al., 2007 ; Schäfer, 2012 ; Weingart et al., 2000 ). One of the most widely noted climate change narratives is the apocalypse, which seems to leave very little room for human agency to operate. Presentations of massive future disasters are still flourishing in societal debates, literature, and media, even if their value in mobilizing effective climate action has been questioned (Cole, 2021 ; Crist, 2007 ; Fiskio, 2012 ; Hinkel et al., 2020 ; Stoknes, 2015 ). Another common trend in dominant Western discourses underlines the power of individual human agency, framing climate change as solvable by individual lifestyle management solutions (Adeney et al., 2020 ; Siperstein, 2016 ).

Important threads in previous research have focused on understanding climate change passivity and skepticism/denialism. Studies on denialism and skepticism have pointed out how people objecting to standard scientific views on climate change invest in coming across as scientifically reasoning and, paradoxically, often draw from scientific discourses while crafting unscientific accounts (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019 ; Jylhä, 2018 ; Sharman, 2014 ). Climate change denial seems to be linked to the preference of keeping existing social and human vs. nonhuman nature hierarchies and power inequalities untouched (Jylhä, 2016 ; Jylhä et al., 2016 , 2021 ; Jylhä and Akrami, 2015 ) and might actually be part of a more general anti-egalitarian, exclusionary, and conservative worldview (Jylhä and Hellmer, 2020 ; Jylhä et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, considerable scholarship is investigating the dynamics behind the slow and ineffective response to climate change seen in many parts of the world. Previous studies using interviews have shown that people frequently frame climate change as a distant, uncertain problem instead of a local issue touching them personally, even if they would have personal experience of climate change related natural catastrophes (Whitmarsh, 2008 ). Simply showing images of climate change impacts can cause people to take distance, struggling to understand how they could do anything about it (O’Neill et al., 2013 ). In her notable sociological account of a rural Norwegian community, Norgaard ( 2011 ) analyzes how distancing from climate change is achieved by socially constructed emotion and knowledge management strategies. Milkoreit ( 2017 ) has framed the ineffectiveness of human response as a failure of collective imagination: We have failed to imagine solution pathways to a sustainable future.

A considerable multidisciplinary scholarship has been building a relational ontology, criticizing the notion of the autonomous, rational individual of traditional liberal humanism (Barad, 2003 ; Braidotti, 2019 ; Haraway, 2016 ) and problematizing how the notion of agency has intricate ties with an anthropocentric understanding of subjectivity and power (Marchand, 2018 ). New materialists have advanced the notion of agency as something that does not reside within individual human minds, but emerges from complex networks of different beings, processes, and phenomena (Barad, 2003 ; Braidotti, 2019 ; Haraway, 2016 ). Verlie has emphasized the need for environmental education and climate justice to challenge human-centric, individualistic ideas of agency and acknowledge how climate change actions emerge from the complex entanglements between humans and the climate (e.g. Verlie, 2017 , 2019a , 2019b , 2020 , 2021 ).

In this study, I ask “How do people construct their own (non)agency or the (non)agency of humans in general in relation to climate change?” by detailed analysis of interview data. Next, I proceed to explicate the methodology and analysis of the interview study.

I conducted 28 semi-structured interviews on Zoom videocalls, 17 interviews in English and 11 in Finnish. The participants were volunteers recruited by posting on various social media platforms (Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn) and mailing lists of environmental organizations and university departments as well as by snowballing my personal networks. The participants’ ages varied between 21–83 and they represented 11 different nationalities. 16 of the participants self-identified as women and 12 as men. Four participants had professional background in working with climate change, and some declared having particularly committed pro-environmental lifestyles. All participants signed an informed consent form prior to the interviews and, if they so requested, received their anonymized interview transcript by email for commentary.

The interview protocol included questions concerning the participant’s thoughts about the environment, nonhuman animals, and climate change as well as their experiences and thoughts of environment-related fiction. In the first part of the interview, the interviewees were presented with an environmentally themed story which they discussed; results concerning these parts of the interview have been presented in another paper (Toivonen and Caracciolo, under review). This study focuses on those parts of the interviews where climate change was discussed.

The participants were asked e.g. what climate change means to them, how they see the role of human actions in climate change, and how they see their own chances to do something about it. A few participants specified that they know climate change happens also due to non-human factors, but said they understand that in this context we are discussing human-caused global warming. One participant denied believing in human-caused warming of the climate, instead constructing ice age as a more likely climate change threat.

I transcribed the interviews verbatim into English producing a thorough orthographic transcript that included all spoken words and sounds (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ). In the sections of the transcriptions included in the analysis, the interviewees either responded to a question explicitly concerning climate change or spontaneously, as a part of their answer to another kind of question, diverted to the topic of climate change.

I first read the anonymized transcripts drawing from discourse analytical methodology (see e.g. Potter, 2004 ), paying attention to all different ways the participants expressed human abilities, capacities, acting, doing, etc. in relation to climate change. I started organizing these different discursive positions of agency (or the lack of it, non-agency) into different classes that in the later Thematic Analysis stage of the analysis developed into groups with their own specific “codes” and that were further related to wider patterns of meaning, “themes”. With a discursive position of (non)agency I refer to a verbal expression that has an active verb and that presents the speaker (or other humans and people in general) as able or not able to do something in relation to climate change (see also Toivonen et al., 2019 ).

In the next phase, I further analyzed the anonymized transcripts with Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006 , 2012 ; Clarke and Braun, 2017 ; Maguire and Delahunt, 2017 ). TA provided a structured framework to identify and organize patterns of meaning (themes) while allowing to identify what is shared in how a topic is discussed (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ). Because I combined a discourse analytic close reading with a TA approach, my analytical method could be described as “thematic DA” (e.g. Taylor and Ussher, 2001 ). In alignment with the constructionist worldview underlying much of discourse analytic work, I applied thematic analysis as a constructionist method, thus, assuming that people’s constructions of human agency in response to climate change are constituted in and through discourse and that cultural and societal discourses play a role in how people discuss climate change. I applied TA mainly as an inductive method with a data driven approach (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ); however, my reading was also drawing from the theoretical notion of discursive (non)agency (Toivonen, 2019 ).

In the initial coding phase, I paid attention to the discursive positions of (non)agency and addressed these as the basic units of the raw data, collating them with codes denoting classes of (non)agency positions (Clarke and Braun, 2017 ). I initially coded for expressions of agency and then expanded to coding also nonagency, the expressed lack of agency, because the participants often spoke about e.g. not being able to understand or influence climate change. In practice, the smallest basic codable unit of analysis was a clause, a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate. For example:

I do what I can.

The position above would have been coded with “My own personal actions”. In case the clause in which the position was constructed was within a longer sentence that had a superordinate structure adding something to the meaning of the clause, the unit of analysis was this longer sentence. For example:

I do what I can, but I don’t think my actions make any real difference.

The discursive position above would have been coded with “My individual actions don’t matter in the big picture”. The participants usually produced more than one sentence when crafting a particular position in relation to climate change and thus, several consecutive sentences could be coded with the same code. Below is an (invented) example that would have been coded with “My individual actions don’t matter in the big picture”.

I do what I can, but I don’t think my actions make any real difference. Anything I can do is just a drop in a bucket and I think I just keep doing things to soothe my guilty consciousness.

I coded the entire data set collating interview extracts relevant to each code. I used open coding, that is, I kept modifying the codes throughout the process (Maguire and Delahunt, 2017 ). Next, I moved on to search for themes. I grouped coded extracts into broader meaning patterns concerning human agency that seemed to share the same organizing core idea. In case I as the interviewer made a comment in the middle of an extract belonging to a certain agency theme, the extract was counted as two separate ones, either falling under the same theme or not, depending on how the participant proceeded in constructing human agency. In case I was merely encouraging the interviewee to continue with interjections such as “Yeah”, thus not changing the trajectory of the talk, the extract was counted as one example of a particular theme. In some cases, a theme was constructed with repeated expressions that crafted similar (non)agentic positions and were thus coded with the same code. In some cases, one extract of a theme included several codes. Below is an example of an extract that represents one theme, but involves two different codes: “Individual as a part of a community doing something” and “People doing something”:

I think that the small actions of each individual are important. Because it goes on as this mass thing, if-. Exactly, if everyone does it, then it counts.

The extract represents the theme “Collective agency”, where the core meaning was that individuals can do something together to fight climate change. Themes are thus patterns of meaning -ways of discussing human (non)agency- that consist of at least one, usually more discursive positions of human agency; hence, each theme involves one or more “codes”.

I reviewed and modified the themes, proceeding to check whether they work in relation to each other, the data, and previous literature discussing agency-related notions. While writing the research report, I conducted one final rereading of the data. The analysis concluded with 351 data extracts categorized under 12 broader themes of agency.

The version of TA applied here is developed within the qualitative paradigm and not for use in the (post)positivist approaches; the validity of TA is not assessed by referring to intercoder reliability but by acknowledging the active role of the researcher (Clarke and Braun, 2017 ; Neuendorf, 2019 ). The validity of this analysis arises from openly discussing the analytical process and from referring back to previous studies to see if similar agency concepts had been already acknowledged elsewhere. The task of confirming whether or not the same codes and themes arise in different contexts with different participants is an important one to uptake in further research.

The results consist of 12 broad themes of human agency in relation to climate change (Table 1 ). The themes are listed from highest to lowest frequency in this interview data. The abbreviation “CC” refers to climate change.

All participants constructed agency in relation to climate change with more than one theme during their interview and combined these themes in various ways. The themes presented in the Table fall under three wider theme groups that can be also understood as climate change discourses: (1) Human concrete action in creating and solving the problem of climate change (includes the themes of Collective, Individual, Limited, Causing, Ambivalent, External), (2) Climate change is a complex concept and requires critical mental action (Critical, Reflective), and (3) Climate change influences us and our human agency (Threatened, Experiential, Influenced, Benefitting).

As Table 1 shows, the most common theme was Collective (58 occurrences), followed by Individual (46), Critical (36), and Threatened (35).

The next sections provide a description and a data extract of each agency theme. There is no space to discuss the codes that are prevalent in each theme. Some extracts show the interplay of two or more codes while some, often because they are only a sample of a longer account, only demonstrate one code. The themes are presented in the same order as in the Table. The participants are referred to with their pseudonyms and the letter “H” refers to me, the interviewer. The extracts have been slightly edited to ensure participant anonymity and to enhance readability. Most interviews were conducted in English with non-native speakers, and occasional unidiomatic expressions are still present in the extracts as I have tried to remain faithful to the interviewee’s own words.

The participants constructed people as able to mitigate climate change by collective action. In different variations of the theme, the participants either constructed their own actions as having some kind of social or cumulative impact, or discussed actions that humans as a collective have taken or could/should take. Often, this theme emerged as collective calls to action, as the speakers were underlining that collective action is important and needed to mitigate climate change.

In Joanne’s example below, voting functions as a concrete example of an individual action with visible nation-level consequences.

Joanne: And now of course the question is where do we invest. Do we invest on green energy or do we invest on the reopening of coal mines. These have significant consequences in all ways so that yeah, the decision makers and private persons in that sense. Who are we voting for to make decisions on these things? So everyone does have a small straw of responsibility here in terms of where we are going.

Joanne’s example begins with “we” (probably referring to her nation) facing the choice of investing in an environmentally friendly manner or not. “Decision makers” and “private persons” appear in a cut off sentence without an active verb, but presumably as potential agents. In the action of voting, it is “we” and “everyone” that is given “a small straw of responsibility”; this interesting metaphor creates the impression that an individual’s possibilities for action are not very big or sturdy, but there is a moral obligation to use this chance and vote. This responsibility to act is constructed as influencing where we, the society, are going in the future in terms of energy use, not as a responsibility towards e.g. the nonhuman environment. Typical for most of the examples of Collective agency, the speaker did not construct a very concrete pathway from their own actions to the collective ones and from there to the impact on climate change. In only one example of this theme the speaker specified how their individual action has ripple effects in their close community, at the wider economic levels of society, and eventually on climate change. Yet, Joanne’s extract is more specific in its suggested collective action than most other examples as it goes beyond statements of “we should do something about it”.

The speakers constructed humans as potentially able to mitigate climate change by individual level actions. In some variations, individual people in general were positioned as able to influence, and in others, the participant talked about their own personal action possibilities. Many constructed a sphere where an individual’s actions matter, and then displayed how they try to do their best within this area. These constructions resonate with Robison’s ( 2019 ) observations on how people often draw a clear boundary around what is their own responsibility and what options are open to them. In this study, constructing such a personal “lot” often involved listing both climate change specific actions and generally environmentally friendly actions the participants have taken or could take. Such listings sometimes gave the impression that the interviewee was merely repeating actions they knew represent socially desirable, standard eco-friendly behavior instead of talking concretely about their own actions. The participants who did talk about their own concrete actions often toned down the attitude and persistence with which they act.

Caroline: Of course individual people also have a significant role . I have calculated my own carbon footprint and those… There are these calculators with which one can calculate how big a carbon footprint one leaves. I had—I think it was smaller than average .

C: And then one thinks about… And actually I have also thought about my work, going to work from also that perspective. I run, I don’t use car or bus or anything, so that… I’m sure that in some things I’m a terrible spender, but in this thing I try to save nature, or I have always been like that . So that it somehow… In some things like these where one can so then one aims to make a difference . So yes, people do have a very big difference in this, or the power.

Caroline’s account starts from her statement underlining that of course individual people have agency in respect to climate change. Interestingly, also such participants who elsewhere in their interview doubted the impact of one person’s actions (theme Ambivalent ), had this theme appear in their interviews with this type of emphasis on an individual chances to play a role. Caroline’s metaphor of personal actions is the carbon footprint —a common occurrence within this theme—and like many participants, she mentions her footprint is smaller than average. Running to work is not only constructed as a choice but as related to something she has always been , reflecting the common occurrence within this theme, where participants constructed their environmental actions as something they are or as their lifestyle . However, like Caroline who mentions that she is surely “a terrible spender” in some ways, the interviewees often downplayed their individual actions. Many of the dynamics discussed here, especially questions about climate actions as something that one is and as a lifestyle question, come close to studies on identity-related concepts such as environmental identity (Stapleton, 2015 ; Vesely et al., 2021 ; Walsh and Cordero, 2019 ).

Yet another discursive feature that was seen across other extracts in theme Individual is how Caroline constructs her personal actions as doing what one can . In many interviews, framing one’s own sphere of agency with “doing what one can” did not seem to imply that the speaker in any absolute sense tries out all possible options to do what they humanly can. Rather, the phrase “doing what one can” translated as “doing what is not too time consuming or unpleasant” while implying that there are limits or restrictions to what a single person can do.

The participants constructed their own agency as that of a critical agent being able to spot, analyze, and criticize problematic climate change discourses, narratives, and understandings that somehow misrepresent climate change. Climate change was approached as a mediated phenomenon misunderstood by many people, excluding the speaker. This theme often served in climate change skeptical accounts, as the speaker constructed for him—or herself a superior critical position in relation to what were presented as dubious and exaggerating climate change discourses.

In Gary’s account below, which is a part of a longer extract, climate change is connected with environmental extremist misbeliefs. Trying to debunk them becomes an attempt to show climate change does not exist as imagined by what he has previously called “average people”.

Gary: Look, also this fact of the cars that they are destroying the environment and… Diesel cars you know, I mean, Diesel cars are the devil blah-blah-blah or whatever. Look at the numbers at the data , I mean the quality of the air in the city for instance in this country that they have this war against this type of cars. It didn’t change significantly when there were one kinds of the car around during the lockdown. But this was not publicized that much . These are things that should be… understood. You must believe that we do the worst possible things to the environment. But you know how many people, normal people they actually know that some kilometers beyond their feet is going on a nuclear reaction? The worst bomb we ever built, it’s nothing compared to what is happening when you go into the mantle or down into the planet. They don’t know that. They believe that they gathered the evidence that they will destroy the planet one day with this. No, we can destroy us.

This account presents Gary as a critical agent able to see through misinformation that is not transparent to “normal people”. Typically of theme Critical, Gary vaguely refers to scientific evidence (“look at the numbers”) in arguing that Diesel cars are not as big a polluter as people tend to think, but displays this evidence as something that has not been publicized much—thus, he has privileged access to information that “they”, the ignorant others, do not. He mentions that in our culture, the norm is that you have to believe that humans do the worst kind of things to the environment, moving on to debunk this claim by explaining that the power of the earth roaming beneath our feet is much greater than the power of any bomb humans could build. Thus, climate change becomes connected with claims such as “Diesel cars destroy the environment” and “humans have the power to destroy the planet”, and by disqualifying these claims, Gary is attempting to show that humans cannot have caused climate change by themselves and that most people are blinded by misunderstandings. As is reflected in Gary’s example, this theme often likened taking climate change seriously with naive or emotionally driven environmentalism, resembling results from previous studies (Tollemache, 2019 ; Westcott, 2019 ).

The interviewees constructed human agency as severely compromised and threatened by climate change. They acknowledged how climate change impacts wider ecosystems and sometimes recognized the differences in how people from various parts of the world are being exposed to it.

Uri: Well, it certainly—what it means is that the earth is… is heading for a disaster , essentially. That if we don’t… And I don’t say- I don’t have any answers on how to how to do this, but if you don’t, if we don’t do things to mitigate climate change then I think that it — it’s only gonna be more difficult to live in in our environment . Vis-à-vis the—what’s happening in Texas for instance.

Uri presents climate change first as a disastrous threat to all life in general and then to humans in particular. In this theme, it was common to point to the urgent need for humans to act to avoid even direr future consequences. Many mentioned current or recent natural catastrophes as examples of what is already taking place—Uri was referring to the weather conditions causing problems in Texas in the winter 2021. Like Uri’s, almost all of the variations of the theme were also fairly human centric, and climate change was sometimes presented as a force pushing humans to the verge of extinction. The variations of the theme drew from common Apocalyptic stories and grammatically, used dramatic presence and future tense to construct a sense of proximate and ever-escalating, practically unsolvable threats. The hesitations present in Uri’s example, such as a false start with “if we don’t”, followed by a downplay of his own authority in knowing what should be done, imply that such dramatic accounts of threatened human life are challenging to negotiate. Differing from the previous theme, in this one many speakers did not seem willing to present themselves as experts with definitive answers, but underlined the profound uncertainty of the situation.

The participants either constructed human agency as too weak to have caused climate change to begin with, or so lacking that humans will simply not be able to solve the problem. As shown in the example from Beth, an extract from a larger account, “people” were often displayed as simply and categorically not able to do what climate change is requiring, as they are selfish, comfort-seeking, and consumption-oriented.

Beth: Our culture is based on consumption and individualism and… It’s really difficult for us to change that that we couldn’t do all the things we want to do because of climate change… if you follow the conversation about when we—when they are trying to curb the gas consumption, cars, people are screaming to high heavens!

In Beth’s example, it is our collective culture that rests on individualism and consumption; then again, it is difficult for “us”, to a collective that also includes her, to accept not being able to do all things that we want to. She starts out by “we” but then changes to “they” in describing the attempt to reduce the gas consumption, which strikes protest. Her expression of people “screaming to high heavens” invokes an image of childlike selfishness. Within this theme, people were often depicted as so flawed in their character that any of the big collaborative movements needed to fight climate change would never be possible. In one variation of the theme in one of the interviews, this theme repeatedly occurred as a way to express that humans are too small and insignificant to have been able to cause climate change in the first place.

The participants constructed human agency as thinking, learning, imagining, discussing, and reflecting on the complexity of climate change. The speakers explicitly displayed themselves as tackling the challenge of climate agency intellectually, talked about the global and differentiated influences of climate change, and/or described climate change as something humans need to face by cognitive activity.

Ollie: What is really missing is complexity thinking . We really have to start thinking about the world not in terms of an equation with two variables, you know, supply and demand, but we have to think a lot more broadly on many many things , and I- this is completely missing in politics everywhere. And that’s why I think we need an emotional kick in the butt . I think people like Greta Thunberg and also as I say good fiction, really good fiction books and shows, theater plays, have a real big role to play here, absolutely.

Ollie is asking for more complex thinking to replace the old, economically driven and reductionistic thinking. It is the unspecified “we” that needs this thinking, but the first person “I” is the one thinking humans need “an emotional kick”. This metaphor represents an interesting bridge from the emotional realm into this theme that otherwise tends to highlight cognitive operations. Ollie positions Greta Thunberg along with various forms of culture as able to help people towards more complex thinking. Here he merely mentions books, but in other variations of theme Reflective elsewhere in his interview he, as many other participants, discussed the act of (solitary) reading as an important act to understand climate change better.

Human agency was underlined as having caused climate change or, in some cases, as having contributed to it. Sometimes the speaker included themselves in the collective responsible for creating climate change; sometimes, a detached entity such as “humanity” was displayed as responsible. In more climate change skeptical accounts, human agency was constructed as only one potential driver of climate change.

Adam: So I guess I’m realizing now I’m sort of artificially separating myself from climate change which is perhaps not the correct thing to do, because I am just as responsible for creating it as any other human on this planet . So it does have an agency and it is, I guess, primarily related to the agency of humans who modify and shape the natural environment in destructive ways .

Adam’s example shows him connecting his own individual agency with that of other humans and proceeding to construct a human collective as responsible for climate change. Discursively speaking, this example is a very soft and modest way of constructing human agency as having caused climate change; climate change is presented as “primarily related to the agency of humans”. Moreover, people are not displayed directly involved in doing something that causes climate change, they are merely shaping the environment “in destructive ways”. None of the examples of this theme problematized such displays of even distribution of responsibility to all humans in creating climate change. The construction of human agency was also fairly abstract: Mostly, no specific action patterns of humans influencing the climate were mentioned, and only a few participants specified by mentioning human “lifestyle” or humans’ intrinsic “laziness” as contributing to climate change.

The participants constructed their agency as conflicted. They displayed how their individual actions don’t matter in the big picture unless “the big actors” (such as big countries or corporations) change their policies, too, despaired about what or how to do, or created a more psychological conflict. In the last case, they displayed themselves as not doing what they should do or as doing something they should not. Thus, this theme shows the participants grappling with the problem of akrasia -doing something against one’s own judgment of what is the best thing to do (Steward, 1998 ).

Diana: I am paralyzed by it, because I don’t know what action will truly change anything… and what action is just throwing… a stone to space. Not even sea, but space, where it just gets lost and it’s pointless.

Diana’s example, part of a longer account classified as Ambivalent, illustrates the bleak manner some participants discussed their feeling that they don’t know what actions would truly change anything. She uses the metaphor “throwing a stone to space” to describe how climate change action seems pointless—you don’t see where your stone lands and whether it creates any effects. The speakers mentioned feeling guilty and anxious and described their actions as “purely egoistic” or “hypocritical”. Some variations of the theme showed a division between actions such as getting to talk directly to the decision makers like Greta Thunberg does versus doing pointless “small things” to soothe one’s consciousness. The theme resonates with previous results showing some people experience any meaningful climate change action as impossible in the face of big powers outside their control (Lertzman, 2019 ; Tollemache, 2019 ).

Experiential

The participants constructed themselves as experiencing, sensing, or feeling agents. The speakers explained having made personal observations of climate change in their local surroundings, discussed feelings evoked by climate change, or stated in a more detached manner that the impact of climate change can be e.g. “seen”.

Gary: I can feel on my skin the… global warming , let’s say. I honestly thought it was mostly a theory of something regarding… white bears, but in the last years I have been realizing that it’s not actually like that. I mean I see it, I realized it .

In this example, Gary is an experiencing agent sensing the increased temperatures. It is because of the sensory observations and because he has “seen” climate change that he has been convinced it is not just a silly theory regarding polar bears. Like in Gary’s example, sensing and observing the impacts of climate change was often constructed as a proof that the phenomenon does exist. In one case, this theme occurred when the speaker displayed their lack of direct personal observation as casting doubt on the existence of climate change. In the interviews of three participants, this theme emerged when they talked about feeling despair when being exposed to books or documentaries about climate change.

Human agency was constructed as something external to and detached from the speaker. A vague, unspecified agency was attributed to decision makers, countries, corporations, or science. Sometimes, humans in general, constructed as a distanced agent excluding the speaker, were presented as holding agency.

Cat: Perhaps the biggest problem is exactly this that our mechanisms to take some decisions in the long run are very very small . Democracy—a good model, or how did Churchill put it, a shitty model but the best we have, but… in many countries, something is done in cycles of four and six years , and then comes the next lot and turns the ship to the other direction, so in the big picture, it is not moving forward… the development. And then, business is the driver , so that the big vast financial actors, big businesses so … Because that is our driver all the time, the economic growth and… and business , so… It does get a little bit overrun.

Cat’s account shows a row of external agents: “our mechanisms”, the political decision making systems, “the next lot” (of newly elected politicians), “business” and “economic growth”. “The development” is not moving forward and climate change, hiding behind the noun “it”, gets overrun. In this theme, the individual human or human collectives do not appear to have much agency, and the speaker is detached from the systems within which all action and power are located.

In some variations of this theme, in placing agency on science and technology, the speaker constructed climate change as a solvable and thus, not a serious problem. With its focus on external agents this theme resonates with some previous research showing the tendency to hope that agents outside the speaker would step up and commit to some visionary or collective action (Robison, 2019 ; Tollemache, 2019 ).

The participants constructed human agency as influenced by climate change; it changes humans’ living conditions or challenges them to act and think differently. These changes were not constructed as threatening human lives but as pushing people for transformations in how they organize their lives as individuals and communities.

Adam: I don’t know it’s just sort of like an intervention. Like as if as if humans are like these addicts to a particular way of living and being in the world and climate change is like, you know, the intervention moment where we have to think differently about the way we live our lives .

The metaphor of “intervention” places humans as a collective hopelessly attached to their consumption-oriented ways of living, challenged by climate change, an external agent that comes to people’s lives to ask them to rethink their lifestyles. The long history of anthropogenic climate change is reduced to an “intervention moment” asking the currently living people, including Adam, to think differently about their lifestyles. The account does not include any specifics as to what this change entails in practice. As the example of Adam hints with the metaphor of “intervention”, this theme could have developed to the direction of discussing the deep mutual entanglements of humans and climate change. This never happened in this data, supporting the notion that people do not usually address the nonhuman environment in relational terms and that constructing human agency as emerging from entanglements with the nonhuman is a difficult task (Verlie, 2020 ; Zegers, 2019 ).

Benefitting

The participants constructed themselves as personally benefitting from climate change either because it makes their living conditions easier due to milder weather or gives them more work. The individual’s increased agency was presented in a rather implicit manner.

Larry: I don’t mean it, but jokingly I say that my, you know, my work is in working with the effects of climate change, not preventing it, so. More disasters, more work for me . But that comes with a like sarcastic—that’s not what I actually think.

Larry’s example shows how the participants acknowledged that saying one has benefitted from climate change is perhaps socially undesirable, and framed their accounts as humor, used different hedging strategies, and/or nonverbal communication to underline that they know what they say might be unexpected. Larry’s presentation of climate change as indirectly enhancing his agency is embedded within downplaying expressions such as “I don’t mean it”. Larry frames his statement of climate change bringing him more work as something that he “jokingly says” and as a remark he might make in some other context, but not as something he truly means to say in this interview. The theme points to the importance of recognizing that in ecological destruction, there are winners and losers, and formulating the (albeit fragile and temporary) winner position is a complex discursive task requiring face keeping work.

This paper has discussed 12 broad themes of agency that the interviewees constructed with regards to climate change. Next, I will briefly discuss the themes in relation to previous literature, zoom in on Critical agency, and make some suggestions to climate communications.

The themes involve a rich variety of agencies that negotiate and reach beyond many predominant climate change discourses currently circulating within Western societies. With Individual agency, the participants put themselves in dialog with the notion of a self-reflective climate agent monitoring their carbon footprints (e.g. Siperstein, 2016 ). Yet, both Critical and Ambivalent agency themes included criticism on such emphasis on one individual’s influence as unrealistic and guilt provoking. The apocalyptic climate change stories (e.g. Cole, 2021 ) were a resource for many examples of Threatened agency, but within Critical agency, such notions were problematized as too reductive and counterproductive. Moreover, the participants could not be classified in terms of what kind of themes emerged in their interview. Also seemingly incompatible themes could occur within the same interview; for example, the same participant could construct themselves as trying to take climate change mitigation actions (Individual), doubting the effectiveness of such actions in the big picture (Ambivalent), and adopt a critical position towards climate change as something not supported by mathematics (Critical). This resonates with the understanding that many people hold very contradictory feelings and thoughts about climate change (Hoggett, 2019 ).

Discursively speaking, many of the themes came across as quite vague in how human agency was constructed. Climate action was often discussed in terms of relatively generic, merely potential individual actions (Individual), meaningless and hopeless attempts to act (Ambivalence, Limited), or in terms of what is done somewhere else by someone else (External). The prevalence of Reflective and Critical themes suggests that climate change is often approached as a mediated phenomenon, known from the media and other sources, and requiring first and foremost thinking and other cognitive activities. Even if some of the interviewees live in areas where climate change has caused vast ecological disasters, their personal experience seemed to be translated more into detailed descriptions of what climate change threats look like than to motivated talk about adaptive and mitigating actions. I suggest, in alignment with previous papers, that it is important to continue fostering concrete, shared, collective imaginations about possible futures with attention to how an individual’s thinking and experiences can be bridged with the broader collective level of action (Milkoreit, 2017 ; Monroe et al., 2019 ).

Furthermore, the human-centeredness of most agency themes points to the potential of drawing from more relational ontologies (Verlie, 2017 , 2019a , 2019b , 2020 , 2021 ) in enriching the ways people construct agency. While the themes were mostly not resonating with the idea that individual humans could rationally control climate change, they also did not include much alternatives to such human-centrism. Only Influenced agency hinted towards thinking where humans and climate change influence each other and humans need to address climate change from within this entanglement. Discourses acknowledging the potential of a more relationally attuned agency should be made more available to people as resources for constructing climate change agency.

The most common theme in this interview data was Collective, where humans were displayed as able and willing to do things as a “we”. Fiskio ( 2012 ) has criticized the narrative that people need to face the catastrophe with a sense of purpose and community for romantization and utopian hopes. In the theme Collective observed here, the speakers did not talk much about the future but stayed in the here-and-now, and romantization or utopian hopes were not present in the accounts. The theme seems to counteract the hopelessness of individual actions present in Ambivalent agency and the emphasis on simple, individual actions in Individual agency, while constructing the meaning of one’s individual actions in relation to bigger human collectives. This theme might come close to what Moser ( 2010 ) means with narratives that help people make sense of their actions within the wider social and ecological contexts while enabling them to construct a socially desirable identity. It also resonates with research emphasizing the importance of bridging one’s individual thinking and actions with larger collective manifestations of agency that have a relevant impact on climate change (Bamberg et al., 2015 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ; Milkoreit, 2017 ; van Zomeren et al., 2013 ). Yet, such routes from the individual to the collective level seem to be difficult to construct. This interview data included only one concrete example of how one individual’s specific action (refusing to drive their children to school but biking instead) has larger ripple effects all the way up to the level of fossil fuel economy and climate change.

Arguments against the existence of human-caused climate change were crafted within the themes Experiential, Critical, and Limited agency. Within Experiential agency, not having personal experience of the effects of climate change was constructed as crucial evidence against the existence of it. Some extracts of Limited agency underlined that humans are too small and insignificant to have caused climate change. Most displays of doubt and skepticism occurred within Critical agency and hence, were linked with displaying oneself as having critical skills to pinpoint the simplicity of prevailing societal discourses and the lacking understanding of other people. Doubting climate change was not associated with harboring conspiracy theories or with explicit doubt towards science (Jacques and Knox, 2016 ; Lewandowsky et al., 2013 ). Doubt was constructed in relation to supposedly narrow, exaggerated, or naïve narratives and beliefs held by other people. Scientific rhetoric and concepts were commonly employed in ways that failed to follow any remotely scientific logic. These findings are in alignment with much previous research underlining how climate change skepticism and denial are embedded within an attempt to appear scientific and rational (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019 ; Jylhä, 2018 ; Sharman, 2014 ). Some examples of Critical agency drew from media representations of climate change as still a debated issue within climate science (Jylhä, 2018 ) and emphasized the speaker’s media reading skills. These findings are also in alignment with Hamilton ( 2011 ) who argues that the dissemination of climate denialism has led many people to consider themselves well informed on the topic of climate change, even if they do not understand its basic ideas and seem to have no contact with the primary research literature.

I suggest that it might be fruitful to address people who have skeptical or denialist beliefs acknowledging their self-presentation as rationally and scientifically thinking individuals and allowing them to stay critical while leveraging this position to counter misconceptions. Furthermore, in Critical agency, no difference was made between climate change as a force proper versus as a phenomenon mediated by societal discourses, which enabled the speakers to use criticism of the discursive representations in counterarguing the existence of climate change per se. It might be important to support the audience’s investments in critical agency by helping them to understand how to separate climate change as a scientifically proven phenomenon from societal and media disputes. It might be especially relevant to do this in ways that do not put too much pressure on the general conservative worldview and the social identity investments behind climate change denial (Jylhä and Hellmer, 2020 ; Jylhä et al., 2020 ; Kahan, 2010 , 2015 ).

The qualitative nature of this study and the relatively small sample size limit the generalizability of the findings. Further work is needed to investigate whether similar agency themes would emerge in other contexts. The relatively high educational level of the participants presents a further limitation for generalizability. Further research could investigate how people from more varied educational backgrounds construct climate change agency. Yet another potential research topic would be to study how people respond to narratives written to emphasize a particular agency theme and whether these could be leveraged in nudging people towards climate aware actions.

This paper has demonstrated the discursive variability of agency constructions and drawn attention to some of the general themes and their discursive qualities that emerge in climate change conversations. More specifically, I have pointed out that many of the agency constructions come across as vague, external, or intellectualizing, thus perhaps reflecting emotional detachment from climate change (see e.g. Norgaard, 2011 ). This points to the need to continue fostering discourses and stories that feed the public imagination of practical ways of acting that also connect with and have ripple effects on larger community and social levels. Another aspect combining most of the agency constructions was their human-centeredness, illustrating that more relationally oriented thinking on human–nonhuman interrelatedness is needed to enrich discourses available to people figuring out their agencies in relation to climate change.

Different agency themes open and (partly) close different ways of seeing climate change and taking action to address it. Acknowledging the variety of climate change agencies can help in continuing to steer richer discussions on how to keep human agency transforming toward more collaborative, relationally oriented, and flexible forms needed to tackle the forthcoming, increasingly complex developments of the climate crisis.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during this study are not publicly available due to them being interview transcripts, the publication of which would severely compromise the anonymity and privacy of the individual participants. The anonymized interview transcripts are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

I started writing this paper as a postdoctoral researcher at the stimulating environment of the ERC—funded NARMESH project at the University of Ghent, Belgium. The project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 714 166). I am very grateful for Professor Marco Caracciolo and for Dr. Gry Ulstein for their insightful feedback on the early versions of the manuscript. Many thanks also to Tanja Vainikainen, M.Sc., for checking the language of the paper. Lastly, I also wish to present my thanks for my new colleagues at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, for their interest and support for my research.

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Toivonen, H. Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people construct agency in relation to climate change. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01111-w

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• 1 University of Nebraska Medical Center
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• 3 GDB Research and Statistical Consulting/McLaren Macomb Hospital
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Qualitative research is a type of research that explores and provides deeper insights into real-world problems. Instead of collecting numerical data points or intervening or introducing treatments just like in quantitative research, qualitative research helps generate hypothenar to further investigate and understand quantitative data. Qualitative research gathers participants' experiences, perceptions, and behavior. It answers the hows and whys instead of how many or how much. It could be structured as a standalone study, purely relying on qualitative data, or part of mixed-methods research that combines qualitative and quantitative data. This review introduces the readers to some basic concepts, definitions, terminology, and applications of qualitative research.

Qualitative research, at its core, asks open-ended questions whose answers are not easily put into numbers, such as "how" and "why." Due to the open-ended nature of the research questions, qualitative research design is often not linear like quantitative design. One of the strengths of qualitative research is its ability to explain processes and patterns of human behavior that can be difficult to quantify. Phenomena such as experiences, attitudes, and behaviors can be complex to capture accurately and quantitatively. In contrast, a qualitative approach allows participants themselves to explain how, why, or what they were thinking, feeling, and experiencing at a particular time or during an event of interest. Quantifying qualitative data certainly is possible, but at its core, qualitative data is looking for themes and patterns that can be difficult to quantify, and it is essential to ensure that the context and narrative of qualitative work are not lost by trying to quantify something that is not meant to be quantified.

However, while qualitative research is sometimes placed in opposition to quantitative research, where they are necessarily opposites and therefore "compete" against each other and the philosophical paradigms associated with each other, qualitative and quantitative work are neither necessarily opposites, nor are they incompatible. While qualitative and quantitative approaches are different, they are not necessarily opposites and certainly not mutually exclusive. For instance, qualitative research can help expand and deepen understanding of data or results obtained from quantitative analysis. For example, say a quantitative analysis has determined a correlation between length of stay and level of patient satisfaction, but why does this correlation exist? This dual-focus scenario shows one way in which qualitative and quantitative research could be integrated.

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• Introduction
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Governance of the wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses: a mixed methods network analysis of transnational organisations, silos, and power dynamics

• Chloe Clifford Astbury 1 , 2 , 3 ,
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• Mary Wiktorowicz 1 , 2 , 6 ,
• Cécile Aenishaenslin 7 , 8 ,
• Katherine Cullerton 9 ,
• Kirsten M. Lee 1 , 2 ,
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Introduction

The wildlife trade is an important arena for intervention in the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and leading organisations have advocated for more collaborative, multi-sectoral approaches to governance in this area. The aim of this study is to characterise the structure and function of the network of transnational organisations that interact around the governance of wildlife trade for the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and to assess these network characteristics in terms of how they might support or undermine progress on these issues.

This study used a mixed methods social network analysis of transnational organisations. Data were collected between May 2021 and September 2022. Participants were representatives of transnational organisations involved in the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses. An initial seed sample of participants was purposively recruited through professional networks, and snowball sampling was used to identify additional participants. Quantitative data were collected through an online network survey. Measures of centrality (degree, closeness, and betweenness) were calculated and the network’s largest clique was identified and characterised. To understand the extent to which organisations were connected across sectors, homophily by sector was assessed using exponential random graph modelling. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The findings from the quantitative analysis informed the focus of the qualitative analysis. Qualitative data were explored using thematic analysis.

Thirty-seven participants completed the network survey and 17 key informants participated in semi-structured interviews. A total of 69 organisations were identified as belonging to this network. Organisations spanned the animal, human, and environmental health sectors, among others including trade, food and agriculture, and crime. Organisation types included inter-governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations, treaty secretariats, research institutions, and network organisations. Participants emphasised the highly inter-sectoral nature of this topic and the importance of inter-sectoral work, and connections were present across existing sectors. However, there were many barriers to effective interaction, particularly conflicting goals and agendas. Power dynamics also shaped relationships between actors, with the human health sector seen as better resourced and more influential, despite having historically lower engagement than the environmental and animal health sectors around the wildlife trade and its role in emerging zoonoses.

The network of transnational organisations focused on the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses is highly multi-sectoral, but despite progress catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic, barriers still exist for inter-sectoral interaction and coordination. A One Health approach to governance at this level, which has gained traction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, was shared as a promising mechanism to support a balancing of roles and agendas in this space. However, this must involve agreement around equity, priorities, and clear goal setting to support effective action.

Recent and ongoing global health crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and outbreaks of mpox and Ebola, have highlighted the urgent threat presented by emerging zoonoses [ 1 ]. Many policy responses to emerging zoonoses have focused on controlling human-to-human transmission, but leading organisations and experts, including the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Livestock Research Institute, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, have called for a greater focus on the drivers of zoonotic disease emergence in both animal and human populations [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ]. This approach, sometimes called deep prevention, would need to target upstream drivers to reduce the risk of outbreaks occuring [ 7 ]. However, consensus on strategies to foster prevention of emerging zoonoses among transnational organisations are in the early stages of development.

Within this approach, the wildlife trade is a key arena for intervention [ 8 ]. In this analysis, we define wildlife trade broadly, as including domestic or international and legal or illegal trade of specimens originally sourced from the wild, traded alive or dead, involving whole individuals or body parts across all life stages for various uses including food, fashion, medicine, zoos and pets [ 9 ]. The wildlife trade may contribute to the risk posed by emerging zoonoses through numerous pathways, including human exposure to zoonotic pathogens through wildlife consumption and handling; transmission of pathogens from rural areas to densely populated urban ones in order to sell wildlife specimens; transmission of pathogens within and between countries and regions when animals are sold and transported through trade networks; increased contact between animal species (including both wild and domesticated animals) across various stages of wildlife trade; and changes in wildlife population dynamics with knock-on effects for reservoir populations, habitats, and disease ecology [ 8 , 10 , 11 ].

Despite the importance of interventions targeting the wildlife trade for reducing risk from emerging zoonoses, effective and coordinated action in this area is challenging. First, responsibility for the governance of wildlife trade spans multiple sectors, including food security and safety, economic development and biodiversity conservation, and the issue has additional relevance for sectors including trade, as well as human and animal health [ 12 ]. The goals of these sectors may sometimes be in conflict, meaning that approaches to governing the wildlife trade must be carefully negotiated to agree on reasonable trade-offs. Second, the global dimension of the wildlife trade – with some wildlife and wildlife products being traded across national borders – makes interaction between countries essential to effective intervention. Finally, international collaboration can help strengthen domestic capacity for wildlife trade governance through policy development, implementation support and sharing expertise and best practice. The inter-sectoral and international nature of this issue makes interaction crucial, and transnational organisations may play an important role in supporting this.

In addressing cross-sectoral problems, such as the wildlife trade, a One Health perspective, which recognises the health of humans, animals, and the environment as closely linked and inter-dependent [ 13 ], can strengthen policy and governance approaches. Building on this perspective, a call has been made by experts and organisations including the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and the United Nations Environment Programme for a more coordinated and collaborative approach at the international level to prevent the spillover of zoonotic pathogens in human populations [ 14 , 15 ].

While this call for more coordinated and collaborative action has been issued by intergovernmental organisations that set international guidelines and standards and support member states through training and other measures, the nature of the existing network of organisations working on the governance of the wildlife trade at the transnational level has not been characterised. The extent of interaction between organisations and sectors to reduce the risk of zoonotic disease emergence from the wildlife trade is unknown. Although the value of interaction is acknowledged, many parts of the global health landscape are fragmented for reasons including the large and growing number of actors; lack of centralised leadership; and competing interests [ 16 ]. This problem may be even more severe in cross-sectoral contexts, such as wildlife trade governance and the prevention of emerging zoonoses [ 12 ].

Aims and scope

The aim of this study is to characterise the structure and function of the global network of transnational organisations that interact as part of the governance of the wildlife trade, and to assess these network characteristics in terms of how they might support or undermine effective progress on the prevention of emerging zoonoses.

Approach and design

This analysis consisted of a mixed methods social network analysis (MMSNA) of the network of transnational organisations contributing to the governance of wildlife trade (including legal and illegal trade conducted for all uses). Networks are simultaneously structure (i.e., a combination of connections between elements), process (i.e., a way in which these elements and connections evolve in response to each other), and function (i.e., the outcomes these elements and connections are oriented towards the extent to which they achieve them), and can therefore be usefully characterised using both quantitative and qualitative approaches [ 17 ]. Qualitative data can provide information on how the network is evolving, as well as rich contextual information about the relationships and internal workings of structures identified through quantitative approaches.

We employed an MMSNA to understand the structure, processes, and function of this network. MMSNA takes a number of forms, with applications differing in how they integrate quantitative and qualitative data [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. In particular, the purpose of integrating these two types of datasets may vary, informing how and when data is integrated. In this study, we implemented an explanatory sequential design [ 20 ], using quantitative network analysis to inform the analysis of qualitative data (Fig.  1 ). Through this approach, we aimed to develop a deeper understanding of the functions and processes underlying our structural findings [ 21 ].

Methodology flow chart illustrating participant recruitment, data collection and data analysis

Participant recruitment and data collection started in May 2021 and ended in September 2022.

The study was approved by the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee of York University’s Ethics Review Board (certificate #e2020-310) and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines. Interview participants consented to participate either verbally or in writing before the start of the interview. Survey participants indicated their consent using an online form before starting the survey.

Participant recruitment

This study took a relational approach to drawing the boundaries of the network [ 22 ], starting from a seed sample and asking participants to identify additional actors who they thought belonged to the network. All participants were identified via professional networks and desktop searches for relevant organisations, as well as snowball sampling, and recruited by email.

All participants were invited to complete the survey, but only a subset of participants were invited to participate in interviews.

Interview participants were key informants based in transnational organisations (i.e., organisations that operate in a way that transcends national borders [ 23 ]), primarily in intergovernmental organisations (i.e., UN agencies or other bodies established through agreements between national governments) and treaty secretariats, involved in issues relating to the governance of the wildlife trade, human health, animal health, international trade and food security, and the prevention of emerging zoonoses. We selected interview participants based on the relevance of their expertise and roles to our research aims, and we stopped interview recruitment and data collection when we reached data saturation [ 24 ]. Interview participants served as a seed sample: each participant was asked to share organisation names and contact details of professionals that they interacted with around the governance of the wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses at other organisations. Potential participants were emailed up to three times with an invitation to participate. Where organisation names were provided without contact details, additional contacts based at named organisations were identified through desktop searches and invited to participate via email or social media.

Organisations were considered to be the actors in this network (i.e., the unit of analysis), and recruitment strategies for the survey targeted one representative from each organisation, rather than attempting to recruit all potential individuals working in this area. Depending on the size of the organisation and the breadth of its scope, we recruited participants in a leadership position for the organisation as a whole, or for the portion of its work that was most closely linked to the governance of the wildlife trade. We stopped survey recruitment and data collection when we reached data saturation (i.e., survey responses ceased to identify additional organisations), and at least one contact at each identified organisation had been invited to participate three times. In introducing the survey to participants, we emphasised that we were interested in the interactions of the organisation as a whole, and invited potential participants to forward the survey to a colleague who might be best placed to speak from the organisational perspective, if they did not feel able to do so, and advised participants that they could gather input from colleagues to complete the survey if they felt this was appropriate.

In a small number of cases, more than one participant was recruited from a single organisation, where participants referred a colleague within their own organisation as an additional participant to provide a fuller picture of their organisation’s activities. In this case, data from those participants were combined as representing the range of interactions and activities undertaken by an organisation.

Data collection

The data set consisted of survey and semi-structured interview data.

Survey data was collected through the online survey platform SmartSurvey [ 25 ]. Participants were asked to identify their own organisation as well as other organisations they interacted with around wildlife trade governance and the prevention of emerging zoonoses. Specifically, they responded to the questions: “Do you interact with anyone at any of the following organisations around the governance of wildlife trade and/or the prevention of emerging zoonoses?” (participants could select as many organisations as they wanted from a list) and “Do you interact with anyone at any organisations other than those listed above around the governance of wildlife trade and/or the prevention of emerging zoonoses?”.

Interview data was collected through semi-structured key informant interviews by MW and EGC. Each interview lasted approximately an hour and was conducted through the online video platform Zoom [ 26 ]. Interview questions focused on topics including international wildlife trade management; response to zoonotic disease outbreaks and pandemics; and coordination in efforts to govern the wildlife trade and reduce related public health risks. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Where participants completed both the survey and the interview, the survey was completed after the interview, with participants being sent a link to the survey to complete it in their own time.

Based on a review of organisational websites, organisations were classified by two characteristics to facilitate analysis. First, organisations were classified by the sector to which they belonged (Table  1 ), including organisations working in each of the three sectors typically associated with the concept of One Health (animal health, human health, environmental health) [ 13 , 27 ], organisations working in other sectors, and ‘One Health’ organisations. Organisations were also classified by organisation type adapted from an existing typology of organisational actors in global health: consultancy; government department; inter-governmental organisation; network; non-governmental organisation; professional association; regional economic initiative; research institution; trade association; treaty secretariat; voluntary partnership secretariat [ 28 ].

First, we analysed quantitative data by calculating network statistics developed in the field of social network analysis [ 29 ]. We considered the network to be a binary, undirected network [ 29 ]. We analysed survey data in R [ 30 ]. We used the igraph package [ 31 ] to calculate nodal properties and identify sub-groups, the statnet [ 32 ] and ergm [ 33 ] packages to assess homophily and the ggraph package [ 34 ] to visualise the network.

We evaluated the centrality of nodes – in our case, organisations – within the network, which was treated as undirected. Centrality assesses the extent to which organisations are involved in network relationships, and can be characterised in different ways [ 35 ]. We calculated three measures of centrality within this network: [ 35 ]

Degree centrality : How many organisations a given organisation is directly connected to, signifying how active and well-connected that organisation is within the network;

Betweenness centrality : How often an organisation appears within the shortest path between organisations, indicating the extent to which that organisation can act as a gatekeeper or broker in terms of the flow of information or resources within the network; and.

Closeness centrality : How close (i.e., how many relationship steps away) an organisation is to other organisations, indicating independence or efficiency as an actor within the network, as the organisation does not depend on others to connect or communicate with partners [ 29 ].

As well as assessing the centrality of particular nodes within the network, we also identified cliques : sub-groups of three or more organisations within the network, all members of which are connected to one another [ 29 , 35 ]. Members of one or more cliques tend to be core members within the network. We therefore identified the largest clique, as well as the organisations belonging to the greatest number of cliques.

We also assessed homophily within the network: the tendency of nodes to be connected to nodes with similar traits. We assessed whether organisations from the same sector (animal health, human health, environment, or One Health) were more likely to be connected to organisations from the same sector, in order to assess the extent to which the network is characterised by cross-sectoral interaction. To assess network homophily, we used exponential random graph modelling (ERGM), a modelling approach which takes into account key characteristics of network data, particularly that the observations within a network are highly inter-dependent, and that network sampling is purposive rather than probability-based [ 29 ]. ERGM has been explained in greater detail elsewhere [ 36 ]. Briefly, ERGM relies on the generation of networks with the same structural properties as the observed network (known as ‘degree randomisation’), creating a distribution of possible networks. The observed network is then compared to this distribution, allowing a range of hypotheses about the network’s properties to be tested. In this case, we used ERGM to assess whether the observed homophily by sector was higher than what was likely to be explained by network structure alone, after adjusting for organisation type.

Second, we analysed qualitative interview data. Based on our MMSNA approach, using qualitative data to investigate ideas suggested by quantitative findings, we developed research questions to explore in the qualitative data. Thematic analysis was conducted using the approach described by Braun and Clarke where the focus is guided by the researcher’s analytic interests [ 37 ], with the four research questions informed by the quantitative findings serving as an a priori coding framework. We subsequently identified sub-themes through close reading and inductive coding of the transcripts. Thematic analysis was conducted by three researchers working together (CCA, AD and RM), using an iterative process to develop meaning through discussion and repeated review of the data and codes [ 38 ]. To support this process, we used the collaborative qualitative data analysis software Dedoose [ 39 ].

Sample characteristics

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with an initial sample of 17 key informants from 14 organisations identified through professional networks. By pursuing the network connections of these interview participants, 69 organisations were identified as part of the network of transnational organisations focused on the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses. Of the 133 potential participants invited (covering all 69 organisations), 37 participants from 33 organisations completed the network survey (with respondents from two larger organisations suggesting multiple participants to represent the breadth of their work). At the organisation level, this resulted in a response rate of 48% (33/69 organisations in the network). Response rates were slightly higher for organisations in the animal health and One Health sectors (45% in human health, 60% in animal health, 43% in environmental health, 63% in One Health, 53% in other). For organisation types, response rates from networks were highest, while response rates from non-governmental organisations were lowest (58% in intergovernmental organisations, 39% in non-governmental organisation, 60% in agreement secretariats, 71% in networks, 45% in research institutions, and 55% in other, including organisations such as consultancies, government departments and professional organisations). Characteristics of organisations identified within the network are described in Table  2 . Characteristics of interview participants are described in Table  3 .

Network description and organisation centrality

The identified network was composed of 280 connections (characterised here as interactions identified by survey participants) between 69 organisations (Fig.  2 by organisation sector and Fig.  3 by organisation type). The network’s diameter (the length of the longest path between two organisations) is 5. The average degree (average number of connections per organisation) is 4.06.

Network mapping of organisations involved in the prevention of emerging zoonoses and the management of the wildlife trade. Node colour indicates sector. The figure highlights the lack of centrality of organisations in the human health sector, despite their relatively high number

Network mapping of organisations involved in the prevention of emerging zoonoses and the management of the wildlife trade. Node colour and shape indicates organisation type. Organisation types have been grouped together for easier visualisation (treaty secretariat, voluntary agreement secretariat = agreement secretariat; consultancy, government department, professional association, regional economic initiative, trade association = other.) Inter-governmental organisations have relatively high centrality

Organisations varied in terms of degree, betweenness and closeness centralities (organisations with the highest degree, betweenness and closeness centralities in Table  4 ; all centrality information in Supplementary File 1 ). While a substantial number of organisations in the network focused on human health (33%, see Table  2 ), organisations with high centrality were predominantly focused on One Health, animal health, and environmental health. This suggests that, while many organisations focused on human health are included in the network, organisations in other sectors, particularly animal health, environmental health and One Health, are more connected with multiple organisations across it, having higher degree, betweenness and closeness centrality. Inter-governmental organisations showed high centrality across all three measures, suggesting that these organisations are key actors within the network. Two of the seven network organisations are situated within the top ten organisations for some measures of centrality. This may suggest that some of these network associations have been more successful than others in connecting previously unconnected organisations.

Clique identification

The largest clique in the network was composed of ten organisations. This was dominated by inter-governmental organisations ( n  = 6), but also included two non-governmental organisations, one research institution, and one network organisation. A range of sectors were represented. (One Health n  = 1, environmental health n  = 4, animal health n  = 2, development n  = 1, food and agriculture n  = 1, human health n  = 1), although environmental health dominated. The organisations in this clique also appeared as frequent members of other, smaller cliques. This suggests that a core group of organisations, particularly inter-governmental organisations, work on these topics together, which may allow them to share information, resolve issues and reach consensus on how to move forward within a sub-group, which could be shared across the larger network to facilitate collective approaches and action.

ERGM to assess homophily by sector

Table  5 shows the results of the ERGM testing homophily by sector. Model results do not support the hypothesis that organisations from the same sector are more likely to be connected.

Research questions informed by quantitative findings

The network mapping and statistics informed the development of four additional research questions about the functioning of the network. These were explored through thematic analysis of semi-structured interview data:

Are there sectoral differences in how active, independent, and powerful organisations are within this network?

How have network organisations impacted the network’s ability to interact effectively.

How does the core group of organisations identified (i.e., the largest clique identified through the quantitative social network analysis) impact interaction across the network?

Are there differences in how organisations interact within versus outside their own sector?

While participants identified a will to collaborate across sectors, they also highlighted some competition for resources and tension in terms of different goals:

“I mean, so in other words, whilst we [sectoral organisations] have separate goals, […] if we’re centralised we’ll always have a different perspective, there will always be conflict. And whoever is stronger and more dominant, will essentially win. […] Until you get around the table in a balanced way, it will always shift to the strongest sector.” (Key informant, animal health)

Overall, the power and resources held by the human health sector were repeatedly emphasised, despite its relatively low centrality within this network. This was discussed at the international level with reference to governance structures such as the Tripartite (now the Quadripartite) [ 13 ] and the ability to put in place legal instruments such as the International Health Regulations (IHR): [ 40 ]

“I mean you know the Tripartite is something, it’s good, but the honest truth in my opinion about the Tripartite is it’s been doing two-thirds health.” (Key informant, other) “Yes, IHR is interesting. And of course, it comes back to the power issue. So they’ve been able to introduce a regulatory framework that is very helpful if you’re dealing with human infection, [but] it’s almost impossible to get a diagnosis very often in wildlife, because the regulatory framework, for example, moving samples around the world are so complicated, so difficult.” (Key informant, animal health)

The animal health and, in particular, the environmental health sectors, were seen as less well-resourced, and tended to be less dominant in decision-making processes:

“The environment sector is under-resourced and can’t take on yet another challenge.” (Key informant, One Health).

However, the specific topics on which this network focused may explain the centrality of the animal and environmental health sectors. Organisations focused on human health did not always see the relevance of the wildlife trade, the prevention of emerging zoonoses or related issues such as environmental protection to their organisational remit:

“We talk to the health ministry well and they find it interesting what we do, but somehow they still think that we’re keeping animals healthy and it has nothing to do with them.” (Key informant, One Health)

In some cases, this made the human health sector less likely to engage on these topics. While it was perceived that some actors in the human and animal health sectors acknowledged the importance of the environment to health, this did not necessarily translate to a sense of responsibility for environmental issues:

“And sometimes it’s easier to convince people in the health sector that the [environment] plays an important role for health, and changes within the environment do influence the health of people and animals. So that’s sometimes easier to get across to get the health sector convinced, but then they don’t feel responsible, you know? So if it’s major conservation we don’t do that. Or even climate mitigation or adaptation, that’s not for us.” (Key informant, One Health)

However, many key informants emphasised the role that paradigms such as One Health and planetary health, as well as health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, had played in highlighting the relevance of these topics for human health, and building more interest and enthusiasm from the human health sector:

“And increasingly that’s very much going into strengthening the interaction with partner agencies is moving into the prevention part of it because, for example, the current pandemic has shown us the limitation of how prepared can we be and how we can respond to these type of events showing that it was clear this time that once these new pathogens are out of the box so to speak it’s simply too late to control them. So being able to do more the prevention is something we want to investigate in the future.” (Key informant, human health)

Key informants also emphasised that in some cases the human health sector needed the animal health sector to work in the area of emerging zoonoses, as animal health experts typically had more extensive knowledge of pathogens that were common in animals before being transmitted more frequently to humans. These instances could foster equitable relationships and interaction:

“And often veterinary services are seen as a lesser partner sometimes by public health [but avian] influenza was a good example, from my experience, because the public health sector really needed us. They needed the viruses, they needed the information from the animal health sector to inform public health strategy. And very importantly, to develop a vaccine if they needed to. So it was a very equitable relationship.” (Key informant, animal health)

Conversely, the opportunities presented by the human health sector’s platform and resources were also emphasised by some participants: the involvement of this sector had the potential to raise the profile of issues relating to the wildlife trade and the governance of emerging zoonoses.

While there were sectoral differences in power and investment across the network, many participants saw the One Health approach, which was seen to have increasingly gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a mechanism to give the animal and environmental health sectors more of a seat at the table. However, many cautioned that this approach could become tokenistic unless it was based on specific goals shared by the sectors, and supported by a clear plan for implementation.

Key informants’ perspectives aligned with the quantitative finding that network organisations (i.e., organisations whose explicit goal is to bring actors together) were not playing a key role in creating new connections between organisations in the network. Participants reported that they had had some interactions with many of the organisations in the network for many years, independent of the network organisations, some of which had only emerged fairly recently.

However, network organisations were seen to support interaction in other ways. Network organisations contributed to centring previously marginalised interests, such as the health of wildlife populations, and working to convene parties and facilitate new work and interactions on these topics:

“So this is where we see our role is really as a convenor in some ways. It’s to unite around shared goals with a shared vision. That was something from our experience that was quite important, to develop a joint vision that we can all get behind. And of course that’s a challenge in itself because if it gets too vague then anybody will just kind of align behind it and that was not really unifying either. And so it’s not easy.” (Key informant, One Health)

The services they provided to their members included highlighting potential areas of synergy, where different organisations could work together on projects that would benefit them both. For example, where multiple organisations were seeking funds for projects with overlap in terms of geography or disease focus, network organisations connected organisations to develop more competitive and resource-efficient funding applications. Network organisations also provided connections to relevant experts and supported partnership development to access and use resources more effectively. They also worked with organisations and governments at the national level, connecting countries to support learning and information sharing. For example, where a national government expressed interest in improving their capacity to conduct risk assessments in wildlife markets, a network organisation organised an information session on the topic, inviting representatives from other countries to attend and share information, resources and lessons from their own efforts in the area.

How does the core group of organisations impact interaction across the network?

The core group of organisations seemed central to the functioning of the network. They played a convening function, bringing together different organisations both within and between countries through mechanisms such as working groups or expert panels, sharing information, and providing a platform to build buy-in from national-level actors. They also advocated across sectors, making the case for disease in wildlife populations as a shared threat, and highlighting cases where interventions were a ‘win-win’ for multiple sectors. This enabled them to involve new stakeholders and build buy-in. Finally, this core group of organisations had a certain institutional memory of collaborative work, and could draw on existing networks and modes of working that had been put in place during previous outbreaks of zoonotic disease.

However, this core group had certain limitations in its activities. Transnational organisations typically interfaced with their sectoral equivalent within a national context (e.g., a transnational animal health organisation would mainly interact with a national-level animal health organisation). This meant that, while inter-sectoral coordination was happening transnationally, in-country work depended on existing coordination between sectors in a given country context. This inter-sectoral interaction was not always present at the national level:

"[…] over the past year, we’ve been surveying our member countries on to what extent they are involved in regulating wildlife trade. And it varies from country to country. […] And we can have an effect working through veterinary services but only if the veterinary services are a working partnership with other actors at national level, whether that be wildlife, health, or foreign authorities or environment agencies, or whatever." (Key informant, animal health)

There was also a perception that this core group – dominated by inter-governmental organisations – faced bureaucratic barriers to action and interaction, and may struggle to respond to rapidly changing issues such as the prevention of emerging zoonoses:

“The bureaucratic barrier can hinder efficient collaboration among global government offices due to entrenched working habits, which may take years to change.” (Key informant, animal health)

Bureaucratic barriers identified by participants included a misalignment between sectoral mandates and responsibilities at national and transnational levels, particularly for an area such as the wildlife trade which may be governed by different sectors in different contexts:

“Or they may not have the mandate – in one country it might be the public health institute that has the mandate for food safety regulations in a food market, in another place it might be an agricultural department, right. So, because wildlife suffers the fate of being of interest to everybody, nobody wants to own it. And because there’s no minister of coordination, right, there is no department of integration, there’s nobody who develops the strategic advantages by working in cross-sectors.” (Key informant, animal health)

Participants also reported bureaucratic barriers to coordinated transnational action on animal health which were not present in the human health sector. For example, one participant reported challenges in identifying disease outbreaks in animal, and particularly wildlife, populations, due to regulations preventing sending samples across national borders for timely testing. While the International Health Regulations supported these procedures for human populations, the same measures were not in place for wildlife.

In addition, while the core group was cross-sectoral, there was a perception that the learnings or commitments that emerged from their interactions did not necessarily diffuse into their respective organisations. Finally, there was concern that this core group kept certain highly relevant voices out of mainstream decision-making, particularly actors from the environmental health sector: animal and, particularly, human health agencies tended to be more powerful and better funded, and the relevance of the environmental health sector to decision-making was not always recognised, either by the environmental health sector itself or agencies from other sectors.

Key informants reported that the wildlife trade was outside the traditional remit of the animal health sector, which typically focuses on providing veterinary care for domesticated animals, as well as outside the human health sector, despite the risk presented to human health by emerging zoonoses and the relevance of the wildlife trade to human health topics such as food safety. However, many stated that this had changed somewhat because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the governance of the wildlife trade necessitated inter-sectoral interaction, which may explain the lack of homophily by sector within this network: some level of inter-sectoral interaction was required to address a topic that does not fall clearly into the remit of any one sector.

At the same time, participants highlighted distinctions between intra- and intersectoral interaction. Interaction across sectors typically focused on ad hoc connections, such as establishing working groups or developing training for on-the-ground staff that needed a more holistic skill set. This type of work depended on mutual willingness and the recognition of shared aims, as well as the availability of resources to support sustained engagement. Another main type of interaction involved learning from other sectors’ expertise, which could also avoid a duplication of efforts to build up expertise within each sector:

“So we don’t come into it trying to be health specialists, if you know what I mean. We’re coming in with a wildlife [perspective] and seeing how we can add that understanding to people and organisations that have an animal health or public health focus.” (Key informant, environment)

Participants acknowledged that there were substantial barriers to inter-sectoral interaction, however. Typically, sectors had different goals, terminology, and metrics for success, as well as different governance structures. Some key informants saw the conflicting goals as a strength and an opportunity for learning:

“So it’s definitely a strength to work with people that do not have the same perspective and the same interest. The key thing is to define this common interest.” (Key informant, other)

While all key informants acknowledged the importance of cross-sectoral interaction around the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses, some acknowledged that working within a sector could sometimes be a more expedient way of making progress.

Statement of principal findings

The network of transnational organisations focusing on the governance of wildlife trade is composed of many types of organisations from sectors including human, animal, and environmental health. Our findings highlight the intensely inter-sectoral nature of this area, and a desire among its members to see greater interaction. This interaction was supported by the establishment of network organisations and the efforts of a core, multi-sectoral group of organisations that was well-connected and influential within the transnational network as well as with national-level actors.

However, inter-sectoral interaction was often challenging due to conflicting aims and perspectives. The network was also impacted by power dynamics: the human health sector, while historically less involved in wildlife trade governance, was seen as better resourced, more powerful, and influential. This was seen as both a boon for the network and its interests, as the involvement of the human health sector brought resources and a larger platform, and a risk to equity between actors. A One Health approach was seen as a potential way to build decision-making and governance processes on a more equitable footing, but key informants emphasised the importance of clarity around goals and implementation for such an approach.

Strengths and limitations

This network was conceptualised as a binary undirected graph based on participant responses about organisational interactions. This meant that connections identified by one organisation were taken to be mutual, and the intensity and more specific nature of relationships was not considered. This decision was made after piloting the survey instrument: we found that participants were unwilling to characterise the nature and frequency of professional interactions between their organisations’ many partners. The time taken to complete this more detailed survey instrument may have caused participants to give up before completing the survey, a comment explicitly made in some survey responses. We therefore simplified the survey instrument and analysis approach to look at interactions more broadly defined, characterised simply as existent or non-existent. As a result, our quantitative analysis could not incorporate more nuanced aspects of organisational relationships. Our characterisation of ‘interactions’ therefore conceals complexity: interactions may have consisted of activities including resource-sharing, information sharing, or providing and securing agreement, and even included interactions that may have been antagonistic, as well as collaborative. However, by complementing the survey data with qualitative data, we were able to explore aspects of network process and function that could not be captured through the survey, which helped to capture nuance which might have been missed if focusing only on the quantitative analysis. For example, our quantitative results suggested that organisations were not more likely to be connected to organisations within their own sector compared to other sectors. However, our qualitative analysis highlighted that while cross-sectoral connections existed, the nature and intensity of these connections did vary by sector.

Our study also faced two of the key challenges which are typical of organisational network analysis. First, while the analysis was carried out at the level of organisations, our participants were individuals working within those organisations, targeting a key informant in each organisation in line with typical practice in organisational network analysis [ 41 , 42 , 43 ]. It is therefore possible that their perspectives did not include all of their organisations’ interactions [ 44 ]. We tried to mitigate this by emphasising that we were interested in the interactions of the organisation as a whole; by inviting potential participants to forward the survey to a colleague who might be best placed to speak from the organisational perspective, if they did not feel able to do so; and by advising participants that they could gather input from colleagues to complete the survey if they felt this was appropriate.

Second, given that we received responses from less than half of the organisations identified in the network, our data set is likely to be characterised by data missingness, which is a key challenge in survey-based research, and network analysis in particular [ 29 , 44 ]. At the data collection phase, we attempted to mitigate this by following up with participants up to three times over the space of several months; seeking personalised introductions; and inviting additional participants from the same organisations where no response was received. At the analysis phase, we included inter-organisational ties where they were confirmed by a single organisation, in order to minimise the impact of missing data on our findings. The centrality measures discussed here, and other node-level characteristics, are sensitive to missing data, and higher amounts of missing data lead to lower correlation between the ‘real’ and measured properties of nodes, though this effect may vary across networks with different properties [ 45 ]. In this analysis, measured centrality of groups of organisations with lower response rates, namely organisations in the human and environmental health sectors and non-governmental organisations, may therefore be less accurate than measured centrality for other groups. However, it is not known whether this would have led to an over- or under-estimation of organisation centrality: one of the under-represented groups, the environmental sector, was found to be highly central, while the remaining groups were not. Our mixed methods approach also adds depth to our understanding, allowing us to interrogate the findings from the quantitative analysis, identifying points where both data sets are aligned and divergent.

Finally, network analysis provides a snapshot of a network at a given point in time. While the mixed methods approach allowed us to understand how the network had been evolving, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the network has most likely continued to evolve since data collection ended.

Implications for policy and practice

In this analysis, we found that the COVID-19 pandemic, and other zoonotic epidemics and pandemics, played a key role in fostering greater multi-sectoral interaction across this network. As our qualitative findings suggest that, while organisational interactions happened across sectors, inter-sectoral work is challenging, that working within one sector may be more expedient, and that bureaucratic barriers to agile action exist at this level of governance, the importance of building cross-sectoral governance structures in ‘peace time’ – when international health crises are not driving urgent action – seems clear.

The importance of inter-sectoral work and the value of a One Health approach to the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses seems broadly recognised by our key informants. However, participants stressed that this must be more than a rhetorical position, and must be supported by clear goals and strategies for implementation. Our findings highlight that, while the organisations in this network are broadly in agreement with the importance of One Health, they may have strongly conflicting views around what the term means and what the approach looks like in practice.

While this analysis focused on the transnational level of governance, the interplay between these actors and national and subnational governments is key to making recommendations based on these findings. With the exception of the treaty secretariats that featured in the network, most of the organisations do not have a power to compel, and instead act by convening different parties, developing standards and providing information and expertise. Within these boundaries, the organisations within this network can build on their successful practice of sharing information, identifying and connecting experts, developing guidance, and convening countries for mutual learning. However, it would be important to build the inter-sectoral, One Health approach to these issues into their interactions with national governments, as this could also diffuse the approach to the national and sub-national level.

Comparison to existing literature

To our knowledge, this is the first global network analysis focused on the governance of wildlife trade within the context of prevention of emerging zoonoses by transnational organisations, though a country-level network analysis of UK-based organisations combatting the illegal wildlife trade was published pre-pandemic [ 46 ]. While some international actors were identified as belonging to this country-level network, these were much more focused on conservation, animal welfare and crime prevention (e.g., Interpol, International Institute for Environment and Development, International Fund for Animal Welfare, World Wildlife Fund). Organisations focused on agriculture and food security, which were identified as part of the network in the current study, were not identified. This may reflect the UK-focused study’s emphasis specifically on illegal wildlife trade, which may not be considered for its contribution to food security in the same way, as well as its lack of emphasis on zoonotic disease, which centres interactions between wildlife, livestock, and people – including in food-relevant sites such as farms and markets – as potential drivers of disease transmission.

Health-focused network analyses of global actors are also relatively rare, although an existing analysis of the global health space more broadly found similar types of actors involved, including non-governmental organisations, inter-governmental organisations, professional associations and national governments with an international remit [ 23 ]. In contrast to this analysis, we did not identify any industry bodies as being a part of this network. While key informants mentioned the relevance of certain industry sectors, such as agriculture and pharmaceutical development, to this area, these actors were not named as being directly part of the network. The wildlife trade itself did not seem to have a representative industry body with ties to this network. At other levels of governance, our findings were aligned with other network analysis studies which have highlighted the wide range of sectors involved in the control of zoonotic disease, and highlight the role of disease outbreaks in fostering greater inter-sectoral interaction and more openness to a One Health approach [ 47 ].

Our findings align with previous studies on barriers to effective One Health efforts. Existing literature also highlights some of the issues identified in our study, including professional divisions between human, animal and environmental health practitioners and policymakers; differences in terminology; and a lack of coordination and collaboration [ 48 , 49 , 50 ]. However, in contrast to studies focused on One Health topics more broadly, which often find the environmental health sector to be under-represented in One Health efforts [ 49 , 51 ], this sector was fairly central to our network, perhaps because of the network’s focus on wildlife, and particularly the wildlife trade, as opposed to domesticated animals. While several recent disease outbreaks have been linked to changing human-wildlife interactions [ 10 , 11 ], wildlife and wildlife trade predominantly fall under the remit of environmental protection, hence environmental health, with much global governance of wildlife being focused on conservation [ 12 , 52 ]. Indeed, the wildlife trade, both legal and illegal, has been identified as one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss, which has corresponded with policy responses at various governance levels [ 52 , 53 , 54 ]. Our analytical approach also yielded new insights around the relative centrality of the human health sector in this particular One Health topic: while many of the organisations in the network belonged to the human health sector, the position of these organisations within the network seemed to suggest that it may be less central to the network.

Finally, our study seems to confirm findings from similar studies on network governance in global health, which have emphasised the importance of lead organisations within networks to generate policy momentum. When studying organisational networks, an essential question is how the collaboration between actors in these systems is governed. Provan and Kenis proposed three ways in which organisational networks could be governed: through ‘shared governance’, with wide-spread distribution of power and decision-making functions; through ‘lead organisation governance’, with one member organisation leading governance; or through ‘network administrative organisation governance’, with a dedicated network administrative organisation to govern the network [ 55 ]. Our network does not seem to fit neatly into any of the three categories, but most closely resembles a shared governance approach in which the network is governed by all organisations interacting with each other, resulting in a somewhat decentralised network, though a core group of organisations was central to network governance. Inferring from studies of network governance focused on other global health topics [ 56 ], a dedicated network administrative organisation for wildlife trade might be an important step towards improving network governance in this policy space, which may also improve its effectiveness.

Future research

While our quantitative analysis was cross-sectional, qualitative findings highlighted the impact the COVID-19 pandemic was continuing to have on this network. Additional research could continue to explore how this network is changing over time; for example, by taking a longitudinal network analysis approach [ 44 ]. This approach is useful when evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to strengthen interaction and connection across the network, and could be used to evaluate the impact of mechanisms to strengthen interaction, such as the ‘network organisations’ that we identified.

In addition, research is needed to better understand how cross-sectoral interactions, such as those occurring in this network, can strengthen relational coordination, defined as “a mutually reinforcing process of communicating and relating for the purpose of task integration” [ 57 ]. A survey tool can be used to evaluate the extent of frequent, timely, accurate, and problem-solving communications and to gauge the level of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect required for effective collaborative initiatives [ 58 ]. Structures that support greater relational coordination can help network actors to think about working towards shared goals and understanding how their own contributions and those of others contribute to shared outcomes [ 57 ]. Stronger relational coordination may therefore contribute to more effective action in complex networks such as the one analysed in this study, where competing goals can impede progress. Assessing and improving relational coordination can help reframe the discussion around risk mitigation and the need to revise existing policy, considering the expertise, competencies, and experiences of cross-sectoral networks.

Finally, further research could assess to what extent the current level of interaction in this network supports or undermines these organisations’ capacity to prevent the emergence of zoonoses in human and animal populations. While key informants seemed to broadly share the assumption, common in network-focused literature [ 59 ], that more interaction across this network would support more effective action, this assumption could be further explored empirically. Multi-sectoral collaboration is often seen as positive, especially for complex problems where bringing together knowledge and resources can support new ways of thinking and the implementation of more effective solutions, particularly where action from multiple actors may be needed to solve a problem [ 59 ]. However, these interactions come at a cost in terms of time and resources [ 60 ], and the extent to which potential benefits outweigh costs should be assessed.

The network of transnational organisations focused on the governance of wildlife trade is highly multi-sectoral, but barriers still exist to inter-sectoral interaction.

This study highlights some important ways in which the network can be strengthened, including by continuing to build and invest efforts into multi-sectoral governance and action in a sustained way, moving from a more reactive stance to one focused on prevention and preparedness. This will require the continued support of the human health sector, which has sometimes seen issues, such as wildlife health, as beyond its remit. Transnational organisations may also explore options for connecting with country-level partners in a more cross-sectoral way, helping to mainstream a One Health approach to policy and governance. Finally, a One Health approach to governance at this level, which has gained traction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, may be a mechanism to support more equitable balancing of roles and agendas in this space. However, this must involve agreement around priorities and clear goal setting to support effective action.

Data availability

Because the global governance community interviewed as part of this study is relatively small and closely knit, full interview transcripts cannot be shared beyond the project team as this may compromise participants’ anonymity. The anonymised quantitative data set is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Analysis code for the quantitative analysis is available on GitHub.

Abbreviations

Mixed methods social network analysis

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all study participants for generously contributing their time and insights to this study.

This study was undertaken as part of a project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Grant Reference Number VR5-172686. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. CCA and TLP acknowledge internal research support from York University. MW and CCA acknowledge internal research support from the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. EGC was supported by the Cedar Tree Foundation and the Society for Conservation Biology through the David H Smith Conservation Research Fellowship Program. KML acknowledges funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research through a Health System Impact Fellowship. AMV acknowledges support from York University through a York Research Chair in Population Health Ethics & Law.

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Conception and design: CCA, TLP, EGC, MW. Acquisition of ethics certificate: CCA, TLP, EGC, MW. Acquisition of data: MW, EGC, CCA, KML. Analysis and interpretation of data: CCA, AD, RM, TLP. Drafting of the manuscript: CCA. Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: AD, EGC, MW, CA, KC, AR, AMV, PT, TLP. Obtaining funding: TLP, MW.

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Clifford Astbury, C., Demeshko, A., Gallo-Cajiao, E. et al. Governance of the wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses: a mixed methods network analysis of transnational organisations, silos, and power dynamics. Global Health 20 , 49 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-024-01055-7

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Ethical challenges of researchers in qualitative studies: the necessity to develop a specific guideline

Mahnaz sanjari.

1 Nursing PhD Candidate, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Fatemeh Bahramnezhad

Fatemeh khoshnava fomani, mahnaz shoghi.

2 Assistant Professor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Mohammad Ali Cheraghi

3 Associate Professor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

Considering the nature of qualitative studies, the interaction between researchers and participants can be ethically challenging for the former, as they are personally involved in different stages of the study. Therefore, formulation of specific ethical guidelines in this respect seems to be essential. The present paper aimed to discuss the necessity to develop explicit guidelines for conducting qualitative studies with regard to the researchers’ role. For this purpose, a literature review was carried out in domestic and international databases by related keywords.

Health care providers who carry out qualitative research have an immense responsibility. As there is no statistical analysis in qualitative studies, the researcher has to both evaluate what he or she observes and to interpret it. Providing researchers with the necessary skills and applying stringent supervision can lead to better extraction of reliable information from qualitative studies. This article presents a debate in order to illustrate how researchers could cover the ethical challenges of qualitative studies and provide applicable and trustworthy outcomes.

Researchers face ethical challenges in all stages of the study, from designing to reporting. These include anonymity, confidentiality, informed consent, researchers’ potential impact on the participants and vice versa. It seems of paramount importance that health care providers, educators and clinicians be well informed of all the different aspects of their roles when acting as qualitative researchers. Hence, these adroit roles need to be well defined, and the use of practical guidelines and protocols in all stages of qualitative studies should be encouraged.

Introduction

In the recent millennium, the constant trend of change in the demands of the community as well as transforming the trend of knowledge production has highlighted the necessity for researchers to adopt a more comprehensive approach. Increasingly, many academic disciplines are utilizing qualitative research (QR) as the qualitative method investigating the why and how of the process of a developed concept ( 1 , 2 ). Qualitative research is sometimes defined as interpretive research, and as interpretations can be incorrect or biased, the findings may be controversial ( 3 ). However, qualitative research is not only useful as the first stage of quantitative research, but can also play a key role in ‘validating’ it or in providing a different viewpoint on the same social phenomena ( 4 ).

Qualitative studies tend to use methods that result in text production rather than numerical outputs. Given that the researcher is considered to be the research instrument, and the plan of inquiry needs to be developed and altered as the study progresses, a qualitative researcher cannot depend upon traditional approaches to address certain concerns such as bias and credibility. Therefore, learning from a series of mistakes is often considered an integral part of qualitative research ( 5 , 6 ).

In this study, a literature review was carried out in international electronic databases including PubMed, Web of Sciences, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Scopus, Ebsco, EMBASE and Science Direct without any time limitation, using the search terms “qualitative research”, “researchers’ role”, “ethical challenges” and “ethical guidelines”. These keywords were also searched on national electronic databases including Scientific Information Database (SID), Iran Medex and Medical Articles Library (Medlib) using the same strategy.

Authors of the present article endeavor to shine a light on the ethical issues affecting researchers and propose strategies to face the ethical challenges of qualitative studies, so as to provide applicable and trustworthy outcomes. This could be the basis for the formulation of specific ethical guidelines in this regard.

An overview on qualitative research in health care

Up to the 1970s, qualitative research was solely employed by anthropologists and sociologists. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, it was favored by various disciplines and experts of different branches of science and humanity such as health care, psychology , nursing, management, political science , education, and communication studies ( 2 , 7 ).

Qualitative research has been conducted in the field of nursing in order to identify, describe and explain related concepts, experiences and phenomena and to develop the nursing knowledge. Nursing professionals simultaneously introduced qualitative research to their peers. Since 1970, qualitative research has been performed to achieve the concepts of patient care and other main perceptions in the nursing profession. Qualitative studies provide nurses with sensitivity to the lived experiences of individuals from different nursing care aspects ( 4 , 8 ).

Role of researchers in qualitative studies

In the case of nurses who perform qualitative research, ethical issues are raised when the nurse-patient relationship in the research area leads to some degree of therapeutic communication for the participants ( 9 ). Thus, nurse researchers must be aware of the impact of the questioning on the participants, and in order to decrease such harmful effects on human subjects, the “reflexive approach” is recommended ( 10 ).

In qualitative studies researchers are often required to clarify their role in the research process ( 11 ). In the QR procedure the researcher is involved in all stages of the study from defining a concept to design, interview, transcription, analysis, verification and reporting the concepts and themes. Therefore, whenever instruments are involved in qualitative research, a human being will be an integral part of the process ( 12 ).

It is argued that humans have increasingly become the “instrument of choice” for naturalistic research due to certain characteristics: they are highly responsive to environmental stimuli, have the ability to interact with the situation, pull together different pieces of information at multiple levels simultaneously, and perceive situations holistically; moreover, they are able to process findings the instant they become available, can present immediate feedback, and feel unusual responses. Nevertheless, researchers need to improve the abilities that make them appropriate human instruments and consequently, their interpersonal skills are of major importance in natural settings and study processes ( Table 1 ) ( 13 , 14 ).

Researcher’s role in qualitative methods at a glance

Ethical challenges in qualitative studies:

The researcher-participant relationship.

The relationship and intimacy that is established between the researchers and participants in qualitative studies can raise a range of different ethical concerns, and qualitative researchers face dilemmas such as respect for privacy, establishment of honest and open interactions, and avoiding misrepresentations ( 19 ). Ethically challenging situations may emerge if researchers have to deal with contradicting issues and choose between different methodological strategies in conflict arises. In such cases, disagreements among different components such as participants, researchers, researchers’ discipline, the funding body and the society may be inevitable ( 20 , 21 ). Some important ethical concerns that should be taken into account while carrying out qualitative research are: anonymity, confidentiality and informed consent ( 22 ).

According to Richards and Schwartz’ findings ( 22 ), the term ‘confidentiality’ conveys different meanings for health care practitioners and researchers. For health care practitioners, confidentiality means that no personal information is to be revealed except in certain situations. For researchers, however, the duty of confidentiality is less clear and involves elaboration of the form of outcome that might be expected from the study ( 22 , 23 ).

The researcher must endeavor to minimize the possibility of intrusion into the autonomy of study participants by all means. When highly sensitive issues are concerned, children and other vulnerable individuals should have access to an advocate who is present during initial phases of the study, and ideally, during data gathering sessions. It is sometimes even necessary that the researcher clarify in writing which persons can have access to the initial data and how the data might be used ( 24 , 25 ).

Informed consent has been recognized as an integral part of ethics in research carried out in different fields. For qualitative researchers, it is of the utmost importance to specify in advance which data will be collected and how they are to be used ( 26 ). The principle of informed consent stresses the researcher’s responsibility to completely inform participants of different aspects of the research in comprehensible language. Clarifications need to include the following issues: the nature of the study, the participants’ potential role, the identity of the researcher and the financing body, the objective of the research, and how the results will be published and used ( 27 ).

Informed consent naturally requires ongoing negotiation of the terms of agreement as the study progresses ( 26 ). Many people consider it necessary to participate in research that their peers, community and/or society may benefit from. Therefore, qualitative health researchers need to clarify that the research they carry out will benefit science and can contribute to the improvement of health policy ( 5 ).

Research design

The qualitative method is utilized to explain, clarify and elaborate the meanings of different aspects of the human life experience. Therefore, researchers can interpret people’s experiences because they are involved in human activities. The principle of ‘no harm’ to participants ought to be considered by researchers, who should be aware of the potential harms that might be inflicted upon study subjects. Obviously, sometimes a conflict between the right to know (defended on the basis of benefits to the society) and the right of privacy (advocated based on the rights of the individual) may happen ( 27 , 28 ).

There are several effective strategies to protect personal information, for instance secure data storage methods, removal of identifier components, biographical details amendments and pseudonyms (applicable to names of individuals, places and organizations) ( 27 ). Researchers have the responsibility of protecting all participants in a study from potentially harmful consequences that might affect them as a result of their participation. It is getting increasingly common for research ethics committees to seek documented proof of consent in a written, signed, and ideally, witnessed form. Researchers can only do their best to protect their respondent’s identity and hold the information strictly confidential as there would be no guarantee for it otherwise ( 29 ). Furthermore, in investigations of sensitive topics where written consent puts the informants at risk, audio recorded oral consent would be more appropriate ( 30 ).

Development of personal relationships with participants may be inevitable while collecting certain data. Therefore, researchers should seriously consider the potential impact they may have on the participants and vice versa, and details of such interactions should be clearly mentioned in research proposals ( 23 ). Overall, the role of the researcher as (a) stranger, (b) visitor, (c) initiator, (d) insider-expert or other should be well defined and explained ( 3 ). As Brenner quoted Kvale state that, preparing an ethical protocol can cover issues in a qualitative research project from planning through reporting ( 30 ).

Data gathering and data analysis

In qualitative research, data are collected with a focus on multifaceted interviews and narratives to produce a description of the experiences. The researchers, therefore, play the role of a mediator between the experiences of the respondents and the community of concerned people ( 28 , 31 ). The post-interview comment sheet could assist the researcher to note the feelings of informants, as well as interpretations and comments that occurred during the interview ( 32 ).

Data collection needs to be as overt as possible, and findings should be recorded. Although there is no guarantee of absolute confidentiality, openly recording field notes assists participants to decide what they wish to have on the record. In health care research, the problem may be even more exaggerated as the researcher is sometimes the health provider as well ( 33 ).

In comparison with other research methods, ethnography has singular characteristics. When a researcher aims to study the culture of certain people, living amongst them is inevitable. This method of collecting data is a subject of debate from an ethical point of view. Long presence of the researcher amongst people of a particular culture necessitates informed consent. Participants should always be aware of the information that has been obtained and is being recorded, and consent to it. Sometimes this cannot be achieved easily and conflicts may happen, as in studies of cultural and ethnic characteristics ( 18 ).

The physical presence of the researchers within the culture requires them to be responsible for their role and potential consequences on the field. For instance, when criminals or a group of war veterans suffering from a disease are the subject of a study, the risks involved in living amongst them should be considered. Ethnographers must be vigilant about any distractions stemming from close interactions that can be potentially harmful to participants in the long run ( 33 , 34 ). Researchers can benefit from supervision sessions directed at learning, mentoring and skill development, all of which can foster their ability to carry out research without risking their health. Adequate professional supervision (which may be outside of the university) can be of service to researchers in dealing with the potential stress associated with the study ( 35 – 37 ).

In order to gain explicit data, ethnographers need to know the role of instrument details. There are eleven steps defined in ethnography which are meant to assist researchers. These steps include participant observation, ethnographic record, descriptive observation, taxonomic analysis, selected observation, componential analysis, discovering the cultural theme, cultural inventory, and finally writing ethnography ( 38 , 39 ).

Researchers should always be aware of the precise reason for involvement in a study in order to prevent undesirable personal issues. The probability of exposure to vicarious trauma as a result of the interviews needs to be evaluated. Interviewers should be properly scheduled to provide the researcher with sufficient recovery time and reduce the risk of emotional exhaustion, while allowing ample time for analysis of the objective and emotional aspects of the research. It is also necessary for the researcher to be familiar with signs of extreme fatigue and be prepared to take necessary measures before too much harm is done ( 40 – 42 ).

In qualitative studies, researchers have a great responsibility and play many different roles. It is argued that qualitative research that deals with sensitive topics in depth can pose emotional and other risks to both participants and researchers. Clear protocols for dealing with distress should be in place so that both parties involved in research can use them if necessary. It is not usually easy to predict what topics are likely to lead to distress, and researchers should therefore receive sufficient training in predicting traumatic situations.

Preventive measures for researchers who carry out sensitive qualitative studies should include official arrangements for a peer support program consisting of a list of researchers who are involved, or a constellation of researcher support activities aiming at improving psychological fitness in the form of a professional confidence building module. Other such measures include offering adequate supervision to provide opportunities for self-development and self-care, and facilitating the process of self-reflection and self-monitoring.

Strategies for emotional distancing need to be considered and adopted if the research topic or participants have the potential to be emotionally challenging. An appropriate planning should be in place before the commencement of the fieldwork, and it must be perfectly clear how the study should be conducted and what level of relationship development is necessary. Measures must also be taken so that levels of self-disclosure, objective displays of emotion during the interviews, and strategies to end the relationships are well defined and communicated.

One of the most prominent tasks of qualitative researchers is to minimize the flaws in observation and endeavor to gain truthful knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary for researchers to continuously update their investigation skills in terms of methodology and find novel techniques to better carry out studies in the field of health and sociology.

As explained before, qualitative research is carried out in natural settings, which requires researchers to work in close collaboration with other members of the team and under direct supervision to discuss and resolve issues as they arise. Therefore, development of practical strategies and communicating them to researchers can be of great benefit and assist them in conducting more perceptive qualitative studies. It is noteworthy that such research should be directed towards making a difference in people’s lives, improving care delivery in different settings and at all levels, and providing a framework for health sciences without any ethical disturbances.

As a result of the extensive body of research in the field of medical sciences, patients comprise a large proportion of the public who are frequently subjects of studies. Research Ethics Committees are formed to provide independent advice to participants, researchers, funders/sponsors and healthcare organizations on the extent to which research proposals comply with universally endorsed ethical standards.

In the history of social and medical science, there have been a few research studies that seriously injured people, and many more in which their welfare was not sufficiently protected. Nations and research associations have taken steps to prevent hurtful and intrusive research. To return to the matter of privacy, the researcher should not rely solely on the informant to identify possible intrusion, but needs to work at anticipating it in advance. Confidentiality does not necessarily preclude intrusion, as anonymity by itself is not enough to protect a person’s privacy or prevent disclosure of personal issues. Investigators should refrain from soliciting private information that is not closely related to the research question.

Considering the aforementioned challenges, it is recommended to conduct further research in order to provide meticulous and explicit ethical protocols, guidelines and codes with respect to qualitative studies.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to offer special thanks to Dr. Ali Tootee for his assistance in the language editing of this article.