How do Sociologists Study Community Impacts?
Community impacts research tries to understand how people experience the development in their everyday lives, if/how these experiences form into patterns across communities, and the extent to which these patterns can be causally linked some type of change, such as the development of natural gas resources. In other words, we need to conduct the research such that we can say that development of unconventional natural gas (and all that entails) caused the changes that are seen in communities, such as increased crime rates, strains on local government budgets, decreased unemployment rates, increased homelessness, etc.
In this video, Dr. Brasier describes the role that sociologists play in understanding shale energy development.
Video: Kathy Brasier, Sociology in shale energy (1:58)
Dave Yoxtheimber: What aspects of sociology are important when considering shale energy development?
Kathy Brasier: So, sociology and energy development. We need to start thinking about what sociology is first, and that's a question that we often get. Sociology is a social science that focuses on how social systems and the way we're organized influences how individuals or collective groups act. So, for energy development, it means that we have research, and a long history of research and research methods, that allow us to think about consistent patterns in how energy development unfolds in different places, and how those patterns relate to the ways that our social systems are organized.
So what's interesting here is that there has been relatively little research on energy prior to shale. So shale sort of launched a renaissance in energy in sociology. In the last decade, it's just exploded. So the research initially began with thinking about what happens in communities where extraction is occurring, and public opinion as well, how people think about fracking is usually how it's phrased. But since then, it's quickly mushroomed to think about protest movements, you know regulatory systems, the way that people benefit or don't benefit from development, into a very large set of research. So sociologists are particularly interested in understanding how social systems around shale, particularly, can lead to inequality, how some portions of society consistently benefit while others do not, and how that matches on to other systems of inequalities. So, really thinking about how the benefits and the risks are distributed across people and across groups.
Here are the critical challenges we have faced as we’ve researched community impacts of Marcellus Shale development:
Correlation vs causation
Saying that a particular issue (such as a rise in crime rates) is directly caused by Marcellus development is difficult to document. Crime rates can increase for many reasons: 1) Unrelated economic changes can create greater opportunities for crime or can create greater desperation among residents; 2) heightened public awareness can result in more reporting of crimes; 3) changes in laws or enforcement procedures can change how or how likely crimes are reported.
How could Marcellus Shale activity lead to changes in crime rates? Establishing a causal relationship means comparing places with differing levels of Marcellus development and at multiple points in time and statistically controlling for some of these other factors (such as differences in population across places and time). It also means tracing through interviews and administrative data the ‘path’ by which Marcellus leads to increased criminal activity. Is it simply the out-of-state workers behaving badly? Is it local people working in the industry who have more money and more opportunities to commit crimes? Is it that more people mean more opportunities for crime to occur, regardless of who committed the crime? Simply finding that crime is higher in places with Marcellus development (a correlation) is not enough to establish a causal relationship.
Data availability
We have come across many instances where data simply do not exist or are not available for the years that we need. For example, the US Census is conducted every 10 years, giving us data in 2000 and 2010. The data from 2000 is a bit too early, in that there are about 6 years between that data point and the beginning of development activity. There are data available through the American Community Survey, but these data are 3- or 5-year averages, depending on the size of the place.
In other cases, data are not released in a timely fashion, such that in some topics the most recent data available is from 2009, which does not provide an adequate time series after the onset of development. For other topics, data simply do not exist. For example, there is no systematic data tracking health impacts, even for workers in the industry, because most healthcare providers have not collected such information historically. So while we use these data, we have to be very careful in interpreting the results.
Differences across the region
The Marcellus region is quite varied in its ecological, social, political, and economic histories, so it is quite difficult to apply research findings from one area to another. Some research and stories in the media study Bradford County, and simply apply the findings from Bradford County to other counties experiencing Marcellus Shale development. The characteristics of Bradford County (such as low population density, far from population centers, existing government structure and culture, economic history, landholding patterns) make this county more unique than representative of the rest of the state. It is not appropriate to assume that the impacts felt in Bradford County will be the same across the rest of the region.