Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Qualitative research provides detailed descriptions of social phenomena. It enables
then to feed representations of several behaviors and attitudes of people, for example
in a socio-ecological system. The authors explore the promises of bringing together
ethnography and ABM. Indeed one of the objectives of ABM is to evaluate the effects
of micro-behavior (interactions) within a social system. They argue that ABMs are
particularly adapted for instantiation of qualitative data and it will be explored in this
article the advantages of the combination of the two could offer.
The compatibility between ABM and the qualitative and quantitative data has
driven some theorists to consider ABM as the "third way" in social science research
[18]. The model is able to reproduce the facts already observed and must also have a
predictive role in envisioning a future state of the system.
Once associated with sociological methods, ABMs enable to fill some gaps usually
associated with the use of qualitative data as the construction of forecasting. With
ABM, replications are possible to evaluate the sensitivity to variations of controlled
characteristics of the population. ABMs enable to describe a variety of groups of
people, to emphasize similarities and expanding the field of observation. It is
important to note that ABM could be used as tools for the design of policy, simulating
the possible forms of intervention before the field tests.
ABMs entail to achieve more details of the description of social process. To ensure
that the model reproduces these social processes as accurately as possible, the design
rules of agent behavior must be informed by detailed micro-data that include
information on the types of relationships and interactions between agents and the
conditions they occur.
We are conducting our investigation on the consequences of boundary work on
evolution of socio-hydrosystems along a process similar to the one formally described
above. In the follow up of the paper we describe our implementation of first stages.
3.2
Interviews
Starting point in this analytical framework is a given social process, which is a stake
for research and/or management reasons. In our case, this social process is the
influence of boundary workers in the evolution of socio-hydrosystems. Due to lack of
comprehensive knowledge on the practices of these actors, we started with twelve
interviews from various watersheds in France. The hypothesis (step 2 in the Tubaro
and Casilli's framework) that we could elicit from these interviews is that the
boundary workers' activity can be represented as a sequence of management actions
meant to foster interactions among stakeholders in order to benefit to the socio-
hydrosystem. It comes out that boundary workers have a list of “recipes”, dedicated to
foster interactions and suited to specific conditions and objectives. We assume then
that boundary workers arbitrate the implementation of these recipes under budget
(funding, social capital…) constraints. With this assumption in mind, we came back
to the empirical material collected through recorded interviews. We shaped then an
initial list of “recipes” following the interpretation of the empirical material. We
provide below examples of these recipes together with the empirical material
supporting them.
