Mixing methods within stated preference environmental valuation: choice experiments and post-questionnaire qualitative analysis

Assessing public preferences for natural resources is a difficult task. The complexity of the research problem has encouraged practitioners to adopt qualitative approaches as exploratory and diagnostic tools within the conventionally more quantitative stated preference research. Building on best practice from previous studies, this paper reports the findings of post-questionnaire focus group analysis, investigating the adequacy of a choice experiment (CE) valuation exercise and its public acceptability. The specifics of the scenario and design choices are shown to markedly reduce problems of charity like and bid-realism/fair-share responses, observed in previous studies, and significant sensitivity to good characteristics is observed. However, a less tractable problem of valuing unfamiliar goods remains, with insights given regarding public acceptability and the usefulness of the findings to environmental decision-making.