Abstract
This chapter critically explores the challenges and opportunities of adopting a mixed methods approach to coastal change. We reflect on our experiences of a study that involved a tourist survey and participant-led, photo-elicitation focus groups with two coastal communities in Ireland. The survey found that tourists display complex perceptions of coastal landscapes that resonate with local representations as narrated by focus group participants. Despite the contrasting epistemological roots underpinning the different methods adopted, the use of mixed methods offered a fruitful way to understand the nature of coastal change. There are, however, significant challenges when undertaking mixed methods research, relating to the complexity of data integration and balancing different methodological strands, that need to be critically evaluated prior to and during any study.
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Notes
- 1.
The lead author is a PhD candidate on the project and is supervised by the other two authors.
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Acknowledgements
The CLIP project is organised by Queen’s University Belfast as a PhD study and is funded by the Cullen Fellowship (Grant-Aid Agreement No.CF/15/08) carried out with the support of the Marine Institute, and funded under the Marine Research Programme 2014–2020 by the Irish Government. This research has also received a grant award for field work from the Landscape Research Group (LRG 2018 awards: Borders, boundaries and landscape justice). Wesley Flannery’s and Brendan Murtagh’s contributions were partly funded through the PERICLES project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770504.
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Pafi, M., Flannery, W., Murtagh, B. (2021). Imagining the Coast: A Mixed Methods Approach to Elicit Perceptions and Conflicts on the West Coast of Ireland. In: Gustavsson, M., White, C.S., Phillipson, J., Ounanian, K. (eds) Researching People and the Sea. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59601-9_12
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