The following thesis presents the results of a two year study that addressed lay
perceptions of the risks to the water resources of the Lower Fraser Basin, British
Columbia. Studies of this nature are important because by clarifying public perceptions,
risk communication policies as well as land and water resource use plans that accommodate
people's concerns can be developed appropriately. The study was based on a written
survey that was administered to 183 lay subjects in four communities within the Lower
Fraser Basin. Sixteen experts participated in a portion of the survey. Analysis involved the
determination of how people perceive distinct human activities in terms of the risk each may
pose to the health of aquatic ecosystems. Further analysis compared these perceptions to
those of specialists in the aquatic sciences. The thesis is structured as a collection of three
papers that examine different aspects of the study. The First paper provides a review of the
overall data set, while the remaining two papers address related subsets of the data. One
paper reviews perceptions of activities that cause eutrophication problems and the other
reviews perceptions of forest industry activities. The results demonstrated that people tend
to view risks to water environments in a multi-faceted fashion. Four factors were found to
influence people's general perception of risk and the need for regulation of the activities that
were perceived to pose the risk. These factors were termed Ecological Impact, Human
Benefit, Controllability and Knowledge. Another significant result was the fact that there
were often striking differences between the views of the lay sample and those of the expert
sample. Some activities were perceived by the lay sample as posing substantial risk while
the experts did not view this to be the case. Alternatively, for some activities, the reverse
scenario occurred. Accordingly, there were differences in judgements between the two
groups as to the degree of regulation that should be imposed on the respective activities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8899 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Cavanagh, Nigel Steven |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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