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Methodological advances to explore the relations between environmental changes, emotions and the decision (not to) move.

Elisabeth Henriet, Facultés Universitaires Notre-dame de La Paix
Florence De Longueville, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Belgium
Sabine J. F. Henry, University of Namur

Reflecting on the history of natural environment and migration studies, Piguet (2012) points the need to reembedding the natural environment within migration studies to improve migration-environment research capacities. In particular, current migration-environment research rarely consider emotions (Parsons, 2018), while economic migration micro-studies take both cognitive and affective aspects of the evaluation of places into account in any attempt to understand residential choices (Frankhauser and Ansel, 2016). In this research, we investigated methodically how emotions related to a post-Typhoon environment, by eliciting a variety of placed emotional experiences with a game using pictures of the environment and emoticons (Henriet et al., 2021). It produced both qualitative and quantitative material that were analysed following a fully integrated mixed data analysis scheme (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2009). People emotional experiences after a disaster are complex, not necessarily negative and difficult to capture with simple variables such as damages, flooding risks or climate change perception. The large panel of descriptive results indeed uncover very diverse and mainly positive placed emotional experiences, intertwining tangible and intangible facets of the person-environment relationship. They question the relevance of ‘providing’ a relationship between migration and climate as suggested by authors working within the mobilities paradigm (Parsons, 2018).

Keywords: Experimental methods, Mixed methods research, Environmental studies, Theory

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P14.