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Preference Assessment Factsheet

Resource description:

reference assessment is a direct and quantitative consultative method for analyzing perceptions, knowledge and associated value of ecosystem services demand or use (or even social motivations for maintaining the service) without using economic metrics. It could also be used to understand which ecosystem services are perceived as the most vulnerable, or which make the greatest contribution to human wellbeing. Data is collected through surveys using a consultative approach with different variations, such as free-listing exercises, ecosystem service ranking, rating or ecosystem service selection. It is generally used with an emphasis on individual perceptions (but collective preferences could be also gathered).

Author/Contact:

Eszter Kelemen

Senior research fellow at ESSRG Ltd. and senior lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest

kelemen.eszter@essrg.hu 

OPPLA username: ekelemen

Publication date:

Requirements:

  • Need to collect lots of new data - mainly quantitative
  • Software for statistical analysis (freely available or licenced) and advanced software knowledge is required.

Advantages:

  • It assesses a range of ecosystem services at the same time, and could be used for all different service categories.
  • It is capable to provide robust quantitative information (from a representative sampling) (Scholte et al. 2015).
  • It avoids incommensurability issues resulted from the assignation of monetary value to service properties that could not be monetarily measured (Martinez Alier et al. 1998

Constraints:

  • Preference assessment captures a point in time, not a trend. In addition, sometimes, extra qualitative information is needed to understand the reasons behind the responses given.
  • Key stakeholders could be ignored when some characteristics apply for a very limited percentage of the population and could not be used to stratify the sample.
  • Answers focused on the contribution of ecosystem service to respondents' human wellbeing (at the one usually measure in questionnaires) is setting aside shared and social values of ecosystem services (Kenter et al. 2015). For a comparison between individu

Licence:

  • Free, no licence

Development stage:

  • Full, working product
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