DOI: 10.5061/dryad.zgmsbccnr
title: Q-methodology on human-nature relationships and complementary data

description: Socio-environmental changes are threatening Indigenous peoples and local
 communities (IP&LC), hampering conservation efforts, jeopardizing
 biocultural diversity, and escalating environmental injustice. This
 situation fostered both collaborative research projects showing the
 potential of engaging with IP&LC for conserving biocultural
 diversity, and ideas in sustainability science as the relevance of
 accounting for plural human-nature relationships and nature values in
 decision making. The success of these initiatives, however, depends on
 unveiling socio-environmental conflicts as a first step to dialogue and
 cooperation. We developed a tool to describe viewpoints on human-nature
 relationships that underpin socio-environmental conflicts based on a
 multicultural conceptual framework and Q-methodology. To investigate its
 usefulness to unveil conflicts within community-based projects, we applied
 it to community members and researchers working collaboratively in an
 artisanal fishing community in Brazil. By purposefully choosing 23
 participants who ordered 44 statements producing distributions later
 analyzed for correlations, we described three viewpoints on human-nature
 relationships and, from them, the main socio-environmental conflicts
 within the community. Two viewpoints associated with community members
 revealed contrasting standpoints about nature resulting from complex
 transformations - from resource-dependent to tourism-dependent - in the
 community. While some people whose occupations depend on outsiders wish to
 exploit and earn money with nature, others who depend exclusively on
 fishing fear that nature is under threat. These viewpoints allowed
 characterizing divergences that can limit collective organization within
 the community as well as shared desires for the future. One viewpoint was
 associated with researchers, highlighting differences between theirs and
 community members’ conceptions. Although framed to a specific situation,
 given its replicable development and amplitude of its conceptual basis,
 the tool can be adapted to different contexts. By underscoring the
 diversity within local communities, our tool helps leaving behind
 idealized notions about them. It also facilitates reflexivity among
 researchers on how their viewpoints can impact their relationship with
 communities. As a way of collectively reflecting about local perspectives
 on human-nature relationships, the tool facilitates collaboration and
 finding ways forward.
description: Prior to data collection, the main investigator (BDA) spent two
 and a half months living in the community (Supporting Information 2).
 Pilot interviews with 12 residents were conducted aiming at (1)
 identifying local understandings of "nature" and perceived local
 socio-environmental issues and values of nature (to be used in the
 questionnaire), and (2) testing the adequacy of the language in questions,
 Q-set statements, and instructions for sorting the statements.  
 In-person interviews were conducted in Portuguese, with each
 participant individually, by the same investigator (BDA), lasting ~ 1.5
 hours (Fig. 3). All the interview procedures were approved by the Research
 Ethics Committee from Biosciences Institute, University of São Paulo (CAAE
 53059421.7.0000.5464). We first obtained from participants a written
 voluntary and informed consent to participate in the study. We then
 applied ashort survey (addressing age, occupation, religion, etc) followed
 by the Q-Methodology activity. Participants were asked to sort the Q-set
 into a 11-point ranking scale according to how they saw, perceived and
 felt nature in Siribinha, using a customized board (Fig. 2). The
 researcher read each statement aloud – provided in random order in
 numbered cards – and the participant first indicated whether to place it
 in provisional categories of agreement, disagreement or neutral. Then,
 they fine-sorted statements into a fixed distribution. Explanations of
 their choices were recorded in audio to support subsequent
 interpretations. Following the typical Q-methodology
 procedures for both the quantitative and qualitative analyses (Watts and
 Stenner, 2012), we started by looking for groups of participants with
 highly correlated Q-sorts to identify shared viewpoints. We did so by
 performing a principal component analysis on participant-by-participant
 correlation matrix of Q-sorts. Then, based on criteria described in Watts
 and Stenner (2012), we extracted and rotated three factors (Supporting
 Information 4), each representing a combination of participants who
 produced similar Q-sorts. We then created an ideal-typical Q-sort for each
 factor by calculating weighted normalized sum of Q-sorts highly correlated
 to that factor only (Supporting Information 4). We
 qualitatively interpreted these ideal-typical Q-sorts based on information
 from four sources (Watts and Stenner, 2012). We identified agreement
 statements that had similar, and disagreement statements that had
 divergent, rankings across typical Q-sorts. We estimated how strongly
 statements were ranked (i.e., salience), and the standard deviation of
 their ranking, across ideal-typical Q-sorts (Table 1). Agreement and
 disagreement statements are the most (above average) salient statements
 presenting the lowest (below average) or the highest (above average)
 standard deviation across typical Q-sorts. We also identified statements
 ranked higher or lower in each typical Q-sort compared to others. Finally,
 we examined recorded explanations and looked for patterns in responses to
 the questionnaire of participants associated with each factor. From these
 sources, we created a narrative for each factor and chose a symbolic name
 expressing their main feature.
description: # Demasi et al. dataset
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbccnr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbccnr) ## Description of the data and file structure The data was collected to evaluate and apply a novel tool designed to describe viewpoints on human-nature relationships and uncover the socio-environmental conflicts underpinning these relationships. The study used a multicultural conceptual framework and Q-methodology within a community-based project in an artisanal fishing community in northeastern Brazil. The experimental effort aimed to investigate the tool's capacity to characterize diverse viewpoints among community members and researchers, identify conflicts influenced by socio-environmental pressures, and support collaborative and reflexive processes for collective action. To support the interpretations of the participant's q-sorts in Q-methodology, a short survey was also conducted to characterize the participants, along with two ranking activities: (1) values of nature and (2) socio-environmental issues faced by the community. The data file is a spreadsheet in `.xlsx` format with four tabs: 1. **"Metadata"**: Contains the description and definitions of the variables. 2. **"Survey Data"**: Includes participant information collected through the short survey. 3. **"Values of Nature"**: Provides the scores assigned by participants to ten statements regarding what they value most about the nature in Siribinha. 4. **"Socioenvironmental Issue"**: Contains the scores assigned by participants to seven socio-environmental issues faced by the community where they live or work. 5. **"Q-Data"**: Presents the scores assigned by each participant to each of the statements used in the Q-methodology. ### Files and variables #### File: Demasi\_et\_al.\_data.xlsx \**Description and definitions of the variables can be found in the file Demasi*_et_al. file* ## Code/software **R** (version 4.0 or later): This software was used for statistical analysis and visualization. The following R package was loaded during the workflow: * **qmethod** (for Q-methodology analysis and factor extraction)