Communicating About Health and Environmental Risks

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Building healthy communities often includes plans for the preservation of open space that has both recreational and aesthetic value. One mechanism that has worked for funding purchase of land and development rights for farmland and open-space is to pass ballot initiatives at the county level in which voters in a community approve a certain amount of their tax dollars to go toward land conservation efforts. For such initiatives to pass, conservancies need to gauge the attitudes of local residents toward such initiatives and determine residents arguments for and against these initiatives in order to best craft a campaigns to help pass the initiative. This project is designed to guage resident and policy-maker attitudes toward land conservation initiatives, provide recommendations for appropriate campaign strategies and messages, and to disseminate those recommendations to local organizations in 3 Michigan Counties. <P>
APPROACH: Objective 1 has been designed to give a complete picture of the existing data on land use and land preservation attitudes in Michigan. Completion of Objective 1 will be accomplished in several steps. First, members of the research team will compile existing information and literature on farmland and open space preservation in Michigan. Once the data are collected, documents will be reviewed and summaries of documents for each study will be created. To accomplish Objective 2, the present proposal will use the theory of socially normative behavior (TSNB) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to inform the design of a phone interview to enhance our understanding of how local policy makers in Michigan's Tri County region (Ingham, Eaton, & Clinton) have made decisions about and helped or hindered policy making efforts around land use preservation in the region. Phone interviews (N =30) will be conducted with local decision-makers and leaders, namely members of planning commissions and officials elected to city councils or township boards. The TPB and TSNB serve as a framework for understanding citizens attitudes, behaviors, etc. and will be assessed via telephone administered questionnaire (Objective 3). All variables will be measured with self-report items modeled after those used in published research on the theories and on the work completed in Objective 1. Participants (N =500) will be sampled via probability sampling. A stratified (county and urban/rural as strata) random sample will be conducted with a sampling frame including residents in Ingham, Clinton, and Eaton Counties in Michigan. The resulting data will have a plus or minus 4% margin of error around all statistics. Objective 4 will be completed to better understand differences and similarities in citizen and policy maker attitudes. This objective will be accomplished by analyzing the data from the phone interviews with policy makers and the community wide survey to examine the extent to which policy-makers and community members are similar and different in their knowledge, attitudes, behaviors related to land use issues. The final, and perhaps most critical, objective will be to translate the information gleaned in Objectives 1 to 4 into concrete steps for creation of messages to inform audiences about the issue of open-space preservation (Objective 5). This will involve analysis of the information gleaned from completion of objectives 1 to 4 in order to design a campaign around land use issues and specifically, a land preservation millage.<P>

PROGRESS: 2007/01 TO 2007/12<BR>
OUTPUTS: <BR>Objective 1. Review and analyze the existing campaigns and research conducted on citizens' attitudes toward land use and land preservation millages in Michigan and, to the extent that they are accessible, nationally. We have completed work on this objective. We have created a database of these findings that is currently being reformatted to be distributed to local landuse-related groups.We hope that the database of information we have created will be useful to the local landuse community. We will be sending it to local land conservation organizations and posting links to it on the major land use organization's websites. We have not formally assessed this or other impacts. <BR>Objective 2. To use the theoretical framework to determine Tri-county policy-makers attitudes and behaviors related to land use and land preservation millages. We have modified our methodology to reach this objective. We are not formally surveying policy-makers but members of our research team are having informal conversations with Ingham County Commissioners regarding farmland preservation. The reason we have modified this objective is because the person on the team who was the point person on this part of the project has left MSU (Ellen Bassett). We address this issue in detail below. Objective 3. Use the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a framework to determine Tri-County residents' attitudes and behaviors related to land use and land preservation millages. We completed a pilot study toward this objective, the survey instrument has been designed and currently is being reviewed by our community partners. We have completed the human subjects forms and anticipate beginning data collection in mid-January. This is being initiated 5 months earlier than we projected on our timeline in large part because we have deemphasized the data collection from policy-makers and because our community partner (MMLC) wants to have the data to present to local policy makers. <BR>PARTICIPANTS: There are two university faculty on the project (myself and Dr. Ellen Bassett). The Mid-Michigan Land Conservancy is our primary community partner; this is a non-profit organization working to conserver land in the mid-Michigan area. A local consultant on land use issue (Ms. Stacy Sheridan), has been working with us on the project as well. Other members of landuse community the Tri-County region are also working with us on various parts of the project. For example, our survey instrument is currently being reviewed by people from the Ingham County Farmland Preservation Board, the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, MSU's Land Use Policy Institute and others. <BR>TARGET AUDIENCES: The target audience to our activities to date is the Michigan landuse community; the database of information we have created was created for the the local landuse community. We are sending it to local land conservation organizations and posting links to it on the major land use organization's websites. We do not know if this has resulted in any change in attitudes or behaviors. <BR>PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: There are two major challenges we have faced so far and they are related. First, one of our team members took a job at another University. She was to be the lead person on collecting interviews from policy-makers. The second major challenge was figuring out a meaningful way to collect data from policy-makers in order to compare them to publics. In the case of the first challenge, Dr. Bassett is still engaged in the project through conference calls and email. The collection of meaningful data from policy-makers is a bigger challenge. Once it became clear that Dr. Bassett would not be here to do the data collection, we searched for other methods of gathering data. The research team approached the person who will be leading the public survey portion of our project to inquire about conducting phone interviews with policy makers. He suggested that doing phone interviews with this audience would not be cost effective and likely yield a small, non-generalizable sample. We then consulted with other colleagues in political science and other departments about alternative designs. We decided based on these conversations to modify our design to eliminate the policy-maker sample from the research portion of our design but to include them in the messaging/education part of the project and two of the team members have begun meeting individually with policy-makers to discuss the issue of a farmland and natural land preservation millage.
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IMPACT: 2007/01 TO 2007/12 <BR>
Our analysis of the literature on land use generally and on farmland and open-space preservation specifically for Objective 1 indicates that there are few reports or scholarly publications that deal explicitly with campaigns targeting people's attitudes toward land preservation or land use generally and none that we could find about farmland preservation millages specifically. We also found that none of the studies that used the theoretical framework we used in this study dealt with these issues or with trying to predict voting for a particular issue or candidate. With that said, the literature review revealed a number of interesting things that informed this project substantially -everything from which substantive issues we should address to how to word questions for the survey of participants. The completion of our pilot study yielded several interesting findings. We were interested in determining knowledge about "bond initiatives" and "millages". We found that people had little understanding of exactly what a millage or bond initiative is and what it means for them. We also found that people had distinct connotative and denotative meanings associated with the terms "green space", "open-space", "natural space", "farmland" and "agricultural land". It appears that generally people react more favorably to the term "farmland" as opposed to "agricultural land" and to "natural lands" as opposed to other terms. Further, we found people generally anticipate positive outcomes of preserving farmland and open space and seem to have positive attitudes toward both.