CHAPTER 3: Subjective Theories of Indonesian Agronomy and Biology Teacher Students
3.6 Data and Method
At Universitas Tadulako (UNTAD) in Palu, the province capital of Central Sulawesi, 20 qualitative, semi-structured in-depth interviews with agronomy and biology teacher students were carried out between May and June 2007. One participant did not finish the interview; thus, 19 interviews were analysed. Ten of the interviewees were biology teacher students (five female and male students each). Nine interviewees studied agronomy (four female, five male students). The biology teacher students were between their 2nd and 12th semester, and the agronomy students were between their 4th and 8th semester. The biology teacher students were between 18 and 24 years old; the agronomy students aged between 20 and 23 years.
Seventeen of the interviewees had completed courses in Environmental Analysis (Kajian Lingkungan Hidup, KLH) or in Environmental Science (Pengetahuan Lingkungan, PL).
PL is an introductory course attended by all biology teacher students. PL shall facilitate basic knowledge on people, natural resources and the environment, on general aspects of ecosystems and ecology, and on nature conservation. A focus is on the conservation
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Thirteen students had already attended KLH, a course compulsory for agronomy and biology teacher students. According to the syllabus, KLH deals with the interaction between the environment and social development. Topics include environmental degradation, sustainable development, environmental management and its instruments.
In addition, the course is designed to discuss human-environment interactions in Central Sulawesi, including agricultural, socio-cultural, economic and educational aspects. Part of KLH involves practical work on community development and resource conservation that often takes place in LLNP villages. Thus, more than half of the interviewees had been to the LLNP region; one student grew up in the region. Even interviewees who had not been to LLNP had already heard or read about the region. In particular, the Dongi-Dongi incident, during which ~1,300 ha of forested land inside LLNP were illegally cut in 2001(Adiwibowo, 2008), was well known. Three biology teacher students had taken part in private environmental protection activities organised by the ‘Biology Conservation Club’ (BCC).
Most of the biology teacher students stated that they wanted to become a teacher. Some of them expressed disillusionment about the ‘book-focused’ way they learned to teach.
Of the agronomy students, several aspired to become a civil servant (Pegawai Negeri Sipil [PNS]) or wanted to become involved in agricultural extension.
Because this study was conducted in association with an Indonesian-German Collaborative Research Centre on the ‘Stability of Rainforest Margins in Indonesia’, established contacts to UNTAD university lecturers could be used to recruit interview participants. UNTAD lecturers from the Biology and Agronomy Departments invited all students of their courses to participate in the study. Typical for Indonesian university culture, nearly all students ‘volunteered’ to participate. The students entered their names into lists. Because more students volunteered than were feasible to interview, ten agronomy and ten biology teacher students were randomly chosen from the list. The selection yielded a nearly even distribution with regard to gender and years of study.
The interviews followed the problem centred interview approach (Witzel & Reiter, 2010) which uses semi-structured interview guides. In pre-study interviews, it had turned out that the university students knew very little about rattan extraction in the Central Sulawesi hinterlands of Palu. Thus, we crafted a short information text (Figure
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2) that provides factual background for questions on the rattan extraction dilemma. At three instances, additional short textual stimuli were used to prompt comments on certain facets of the dilemma. In the analysis of the interviews, statements of the students that only repeat the information given in the handout were not considered as prior knowledge. For an overview of the sections of the interview, see Figure 3.
First, interviewees answered questions on their study background, motivations, career aspirations, and experiences in the LLNP region. Then, students were asked about their prior knowledge on local resource utilisation issues in general (research question 1).
When an interviewee could not add anything on his/her own, the information text was handed out to stimulate the conversation. Subsequent questions focused specifically on rattan.
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Figure 3: Overview of the interview procedure3.
Next, the students were exposed to a short textual stimulus on poor rural households that need to collect rattan to make a living (research question 2). The rattan collectors have to walk to rattan stocks farther and farther away from their village. The price they are paid for the rattan does not improve, though. Here, we were interested in the question, if students were able to relate this description to the fiercely competitive rattan extraction on part of poor rattan collectors that (i) keeps prices low, and that (ii) results in dwindling stocks. Furthermore, the students were informed that an entire village community had decided to stop collecting rattan temporarily in order to let the rattan grow again. However, one villager had broken the rule and had secretly started collecting rattan again. This part of the stimulus addresses an institutional core aspect of the commons dilemma: Collective/community action is necessary to potentially solve the social trap situation but these actions are susceptible to social implementation challenges. To prompt comments on their perception of the situation, the university students were asked to imagine who was affected by this violation of the rules and how they were affected.
3 The complete interview guideline is enclosed as appendix 1 (page 208ff). Questions 13 to 19 focus on research question 1. Questions 20 and 21 focus on research question 2. Given possible solution strategies regarding research question 3 can be found on page 219f.
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Finally, in order to answer the third research question, an in-depth look was taken at potential solution strategies for the rattan over-extraction problem. After soliciting some first comments, the students were given a list of suggestions of solution strategies, and asked for comments (see page 219f).
All interviews were conducted in Indonesian supported by an Indonesian assistant. The interviews took from 90 to 120 minutes each and were recorded in full. Shortly after each interview, relevant outcomes and specifics of the interview situation were discussed with the Indonesian assistant and documented. Unclear parts of the interview or potential misunderstandings were immediately clarified. All interviews were transcribed and translated into English for final analysis.
Since we are interested in subjective theories with specific aspects of natural resource use problems, we applied Mayring’s (2000) qualitative content analysis approach. A formal coding system was developed based on an interplay of inductive and deductive procedures. Each code was explicitly defined in a coding agenda with examples and coding rules (Mayring, 2000).
In order to ensure interrater-reliability (Miles & Huberman, 2004), a second independent researcher check coded the interviews. Disagreements were discussed and respective text passages were recoded until a consensus coding was achieved. Codings were summarised for each category and finally abstracted.
Following Menzel and Bögeholz (2009) we used ‘subjective theories’ as the analytical framework to examine the interviews. The interview material was analysed for agronomy and biology teacher students together. However, we mention noticeable differences in the results section.
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