Progress 05/15/22 to 09/12/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Policymakers, stakeholders, and scholars concerned with acceptance and regulation of novel agricultural technologies, including those addressing pest control issues. Changes/Problems:No changes or problems since the last annual reporting period, just awaiting a decision on the request for transferring the grant. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?A graduate student received further interview training and practice through the project, while a post-doctoral fellow worked on qualitative data analysis and writing up of a report on expert interviews. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?No dissemination yet, but a conference presentation is planned, and an initial article from expert interviews is in the works. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The timing of the next reporting period is uncertain, given that work will not resume until the grant transfer request is approved by NIFA, with an indeterminate date. But with that proviso, we expect to proceed with Q interviews and a workshop with experts on gene drive policy, and surveys with consumers and farmers.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? The last annual report covered the period ending May 14, 2024. This final report covers the period from May 15-May 31, 2024, at which point all activity was suspended in preparation for requesting transfer of the grant from Decision Science Research Institute to Oregon Research Institute. As a result, most accomplishments are listed in the last annual report. During the last half of May, the PI and co-PI attended the mandatory annual conference for awardees to present their results to date, and documentation of prior interview activities was wrapped up.

Publications

Progress 05/15/23 to 05/14/24

Outputs
Target Audience: Nothing Reported Changes/Problems: Recruitment of farmers/producers for interviews has been particularly challenging. We will continue to explore alternative methods, as well as timing, of recruitment to increase our ability to recruit both interviewees and (later) survey respondents. Given this problem, we now expect that we will not invite farmers and citizens to our proposed second "convergence" workshop discussing implications of our findings, as recruitment will be too difficult, and instead focus on including experts and regulatory decision-makers in that workshop. Current interviewing with producers and consumers will end shortly as the graduate student doing this work will move on to his Ph.D. thesis. As noted in the first annual report, co-PI Dr. Barnhill's lack of a faculty appointment limits her ability (relative to regular faculty) to recruit candidates to advise as her full-time student as was described in the original proposal. This was the reason for recruiting and hiring a postdoc and a temporary graduate student instead. Dr. Barnhill will attempt to recruit an additional temporary graduate student to continue to support the project. We will review the interview data carefully to determine the need for further interviews, and thus for such recruiting. Decision Research is being absorbed by the Oregon Research Institute, though the precise timing of this transition is uncertain. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Further training for a graduate student in interview methods, and ongoing professional training for a post-doctoral fellow in qualitative data analysis and professional publication development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Expert interview results will be used to draft the first of several expected publications about policy issues related to gene drives. Dr. Barry will present the paper about the seven identified uncertainties emerging from the expert interviews at the Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting in December 2024. Dr. Barnhill and Dr. Barry, with assistance from Dr. Johnson, will learn about the details of Q method, and all three will familiarize themselves with the various software tools available for conducting Q interviews online, as doing this virtually (as opposed to the traditional in-person, paper-based sorting) will be more efficient. Dr. Barnhill, with assistance from Dr. Johnson, will peruse lay and expert interviews done under this project, plus qualitative material from previous studies on attitudes toward gene drives (e.g., by Texas A&M, and North Carolina State University), to construct a set of subjective statements about gene drive issues that represents the universe of attitudes towards them. The final set of Q statements will be applied in think-aloud sorting interviews with experts, consumers and farmers, which will then be analyzed to identify unique perspectives on gene drives, as well as those attitudes (if any) that may be consensual. We will use the same set of Q statements for each group, without assuming that a given perspective will be unique to one such group (e.g., that all farmers will favor one perspective, and reject all others). However, as we analyze the policy positions of experts (#1), we may decide to add a separate Q sort for experts only on nuanced policy positions that may be too dependent on expert knowledge to warrant applying these statements with farmers and consumers. Dr. Johnson will use the lay interview results, in association with our two volunteer economists (Profs. Martinez Cruz and Guignet), to finalize the discrete choice experiment (DCE) design for quantitative pilot testing in a mini-survey of consumers and farmers, to refine the experimental design before we place it in the main surveys. The DCE aims to have people choose between pairs of combinations of diverse pest control options, to identify their preferences and estimate willingness to pay for them. Dr. Johnson will continue to revise the draft main surveys, in light of the lay and expert interviews, that will be used with national samples of consumers and farmers.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? 1. Drafted educational materials about gene drives and five other agricultural pest control options (pesticides, physical interventions, biological controls, genetically modified crops, crop rotation) for testing incognitive interviews with farmers, and in revised form in an ongoing set of interviews (15completed by the end of the reporting period) with consumers and farmers. 2. Interviewed 24 experts from academic, research and regulatory organizations about policy issues concerning agricultural pest gene drives. Experts came from diverse fields: gene drive development, biotechnology policy, ecology and pest management, economics, entomology, natural resource policy, environmental law and policy, non-economic social science, gene drive communication, environmental ethics, and science policy and society, as well as people who would be involved in regulatory decisionmaking. These interviews have revealed seven kinds of uncertainties of concern to experts: technical (e.g., the difficulty of building gene drives), risk (e.g., ecological impacts), decision-making (e.g., authority, coordination, jurisdiction, and independence across different levels of governance), legislative (e.g., international law and sovereignty), regulatory (e.g., role of Coordinated Framework updates), social and ethical (e.g., managing preferences at different geographical scales), and stakeholder (e.g., discomfort with or willingness of private firms versus government to be responsible--including financially--and accountable). 3. The initial draft of the survey has been regularly revised to reflect what we have been learning, and to help structure our development of educational materials and interview protocols. 4. Our two volunteer economists have collaborated with us on preliminary development of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to assess how people make tradeoffs between gene drives and other agricultural pest management options. The current sequence of producer/consumer interviews is testing the logistics of the DCE task, to help come up with a final version that will yield the desired tradeoff information without over-burdening later survey respondents. 5. The ongoing interviews with consumers and producers address other issues besides testing educational and DCE materials: e.g., considerations that arise for these groups when thinking about these six agricultural pest options (which overlap to a considerable degree with some of the uncertainties raised by experts), whether there are some pest control options that are so routine in farmers' view that they don't really affect their decisions about which suite of pest control options to prefer (versus the more controversial options of pesticides, genetically modified crops, and--perhaps--gene drives), for which species gene drives would be most acceptable (e.g., farmers are more broadly accepting than consumers; bacteria, viruses and fungi are most accepted, mammals and birds are least accepted, and insects receive a mixed response), and attitudes toward regulators (e.g., trust; whether they would pay attention to the concerns raised by the respondent).

Publications

Progress 05/15/22 to 05/14/23

Outputs
Target Audience: Nothing Reported Changes/Problems:There are several changes in approach to report. Our proposal had envisioned building upon prior research on public attitudes towards gene drives (GDs) to expand into more detail on views about public policies regarding GDs and on trust, and to incorporate a national survey of farmers' views. We still intend to do those tasks, but realized that this was too narrow (e.g., prior studies had done a lot on public views, particularly considering that GDs are still quite hypothetical; public policy changes are likely to be limited under the current regulatory regime). Most important, GDs are unlikely to be used as the sole method of pest population suppression (i.e., it will be used in combination with such other methods as chemical pesticide spraying and biological controls). So while we will ask respondents to evaluate GDs on several dimensions, we will be particularly interested in their responses to different suites of pest control methods, including ones that include or exclude GDs. Much of our effort in this first year has been scoping out how best to pursue that aim, including which pest control options and combinations of options we should ask people to evaluate, and on which dimensions. In that process, we decided that we needed to account for tradeoffs, which prior GD studies have tended to assess either just qualitatively (e.g., in tracking focus group or public meeting comments), or indirectly (e.g., separately rating the importance of various outcomes for being evaluated in risk assessments, so one can compare the average score, but not directly indicating the value of one outcome versus another). We are considering several options, but in our discussions eventually concluded that inclusion of a discrete choice experiment, which economists use to help elicit relative valuations of different options, might be useful. Our discussions with three economists, who are participating on a volunteer basis, indicate that this is feasible, and we are currently planning to incorporate some such material into our surveys of the general public and farmers, with pretests occurring as part of our already-planned cognitive interviewing, first workshop, and farmer interviews. After we began this conversation, one of those economists noted that he had just published a discrete choice experiment based on one of the earlier GD surveys with the general public, so we have an example to inform us on how to move beyond that to advance our understanding of GD attitudes. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?1. Expert interviews on policy issues related to gene drives begun during summer 2023 will be continued as prelude to an expected expert workshop in early 2024. The interviews and workshop will identify the policy issues--what are they, and how should they be solved--on which our experts agree and disagree. Results may influence which policy issues are included in the consumer and farmer surveys. 2. A post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Barry, with experience on anti-malaria gene drives in Africa, will join the project starting in November-December 2023, to initially work on interviewing with experts, consumers and farmers, analyzing results, and publishing them, as well as helping organize the 2024 expert workshop. A graduate student also will be available to assist on these tasks. Both will receive training on interviewing and Q analysis as part of the training opportunities we will offer during this period. 3. The informal association with two economists mentioned above will inform pilot testing of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) in cognitive and other interviews, and in the mini-survey of consumers and farmers, to refine the experimental design before we place it in the main surveys. The DCE aims to have people choose between multiple pairs of combinations of diverse pest control options, to identify their preferences and estimate willingness to pay for them. As gene drives are likely to be used in combination with various other pest control options (pesticides, crop rotation, crops genetically engineered for resistance, beneficial pest predators, physical interventions), this research will allow us to assess more realistic scenarios for response to gene drive options. 4. The draft main surveys have been refined several times already, but we will continue to revise them as needed to account for the information that will be coming in from interviews with experts, consumers and farmers, Q analyses, and pilot tests of the DCE.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? 1) We have drafted educational materials about gene drives and associated issues in agricultural pest management that we will test in cognitive interviews, and use in subsequent qualitative and quantitative data collection, and have shared these drafts with Dr. Chris Cummings as proposed for planning cognitive interviews 2) We have identified a group of potential advisors for this project, and have begun contacting them individually for their willingness to serve and for their input into the content and phrasing of educational and other materials 3) We have drafted an initial version of the survey to be used nationally with citizen and farmer samples, to help structure our development of educational and related materials 4) We have drafted an initial list of policy issues to be the focus of gene drive policy discussions and subsequently of a section of the national survey instrument 5) We have recruited two economists to collaborate with us pro bono on the design of a choice experiment to further advance understanding of how people make tradeoffs between gene drives and other agricultural pest management options in the presence of the uncertainties involved 6) We have identified a post-doctoral student with a background in anthropology and in field work in Africa on using gene drives as part of Project Malaria who has extensive experience in qualitative research that will greatly benefit our qualitative work, who will be joining NCSU, our partner on this project, in August/September 2023, and is excited about joining our project 7) We have begun recruiting a group of scientists, activists, and policy-makers for a virtual discussion of policy options identified in #4, so as to generate further options and scenarios that will inform our qualitative and quantitative discussions with citizens and farmers

Publications