How Local Residents Interpret the Environmental Risks of NIMBY Facilities: A Field Study in A Community with Multiple Exposures
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chien, Tzu-Hsiang
Abstract
Background and objectives：While risk perceptions and behavioral responses to hazards released from a specific NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) facility have drawn extensive attention, which have been hardly explored in settings where multiple LIMBY facilities exist. This study examined how local residents interpreted potential environmental risks, grasped possible adverse effects on individual health and community ecology, and behaviorally adjusted to regularly and non-regularly discharged exposures.
Methods：This study followed a community-based field work design. The study community is located in the Northern part of Keelung County in Taiwan, where a thermal power plant, a high voltage tower, a fertilizer chemical plant and a viaduct have been consecutively built up since 1960s; each contributed to economic development but also unavoidably caused environmental deterioration and health detriment. Both in-depth interviewing and participant observation were employed to collect data for analysis. By means of maximum variation sampling, 21 residents distinctive in their age, gender, education and occupation were selected and interviewed during July 2013 to November 2013. The sound-recording interview data were transcribed into verbatim draft and main themes embedded in the participants'' narratives and conversations were extracted and triangulated.
Results：Major findings of this study included: (1) Residents’ perceptions of risk mostly came from three dimensions of exposures: sensory observability, severity, and exposure scope. Age cohort or generational differences in perceptions were found due mainly to the contribution of these facilities to their own economic advantage, (2) Seasonal fluctuations and meteorological conditions may affect residents’ perceptions. Particularly, social economic status and previous experiences would influence one’s possibility and degree of exposures, (3) In a long run, residents considered the long-term exposure caused multiple burdens of negative health outcomes, undesirable quality of life, and irreversible environmental and ecology devastation. Even worse, the interactive effects of those diversified exposures were considered to qualitatively and quantitatively amplify the sum of their separate effects, (4) Residents coped with multiple adverse exposures through pluralistic strategies. In addition to developing positive psychological mechanisms to buffer mentally distressed reactions, they also used protective devices or practices to eliminate possible exposure contacts. Moreover, they further adopted strategies to enhance their own physical and physiological strength to fight against prolonged negative health effects.
Conclusion：The socio-psychological and behavioral effects of environmental exposures from multiple NIMBY facilities on local residents were intertwined and multi-dimensional, and closely associated with their life experiences. From the perspective of lay knowledge and lay epidemiology, local residents’ short-term reactions and long-term responses to single and multiple NIMBY facilities should be continuously and systematically observed and analyzed to inform environmental health regulations and policy formulations, and provide conceptual and theoretical implications for future research.
Subjects
多元暴露
鄰避設施
風險感知
常民觀點
因應策略
質性研究
Type
thesis
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