Analysis to Understand the Acceptance of Wind Energy in Bavaria (Term Paper Sample)

LAND ECONOMY
MIXED RESEARCH METHODS
ANALYSIS OF QUESTIONS 1 & 2
QUESTION 1: CRITICAL REVIEW OF ARTICLES: CASE OF LANGER, K, T DECKER, J ROOSEN, AND K MENRAD (2016). A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS TO UNDERSTAND THE ACCEPTANCE OF WIND ENERGY IN BAVARIA. RENEWABLE & SUSTAINABLE ENERGY REVIEWS 64:248-259.
QUESTION 2: ASSESSMENT OF THE LINEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AGE OF APARTMENT AND THEIR PRICES USING HEDONIC PRICING MODEL
QUESTION 1: CRITICAL REVIEW OF ARTICLES: case of Langer, K, T Decker, J Roosen, and K Menrad (2016). A qualitative analysis to understand the acceptance of wind energy in Bavaria. Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews 64:248-259.
Introduction
In research there has been a wide field dealing with technological adoption as well as willingness for consumers to accept and pay for the said technologies. Technological invention has a great move in the current dynamic world which relies a lot on efficiency (Langer et.al, 2016). Therefore, research has found assessment of factors influencing adoption to not being a satisfactory move towards assessment of actual impacts. Therefore, there has been a move towards assessment of consumer’s behaviour though their choices which are determined by their acceptance and willingness to pay for the items. Most past research have concentrated on individual as well as social economic factors, which current research argue that it has not really led to proper or conclusive decisions on the rate at which technologies have been adopted (Scherhaufer et.al, 2017).
The current analysis will make use of case study analysis to assess the significance of assessing acceptance to a technology as well as robustness of the methods and design applied by the author.
Brief summary of findings
The analysis of the research was focused at assessing the factors that influence acceptance of wind energy technology in Bavaria. The study was undertaken in the federal state to access acceptance following law enactment that decelerated adoption.
Key findings reported were on bases of personal perceived side effects, technical, and geographical in nature (Langer et.al, 2016).
With respect to personal traits key findings revealed that experience has a positive significant impact on acceptance. In addition, conservation attitude was found to have a significant negative impact on acceptance.
On bases of perceived side effect, major findings revealed that visual appearance has an negative significant effect on adoption especially on bases of noise and size of the turbines. In addition, infrasound was seen to have a negative impact on bases of health risks and increased fears (Langer et.al, 2016).
With respect to technical and geographical issues, major finding revealed that hub height was found to have a positive impact on acceptance. On the other hand, the number of turbines had a negative effect on acceptance, while distance to the residence had a positive impact on acceptance.
The process related factors that were found to have a great impact on acceptance included perceptions on political processes which had a positive effect, participation also has a positive effect, while procedures and distributive justice had a positive significant effect (Langer et.al, 2016).
CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Evaluation of the research design and sampling procedures
The design employed by the research was case study design. The analysis was qualitative in nature. This nature of analysis has been accepted by a wide range of researchers who presume that making use of case studies help drill into the subject thus revealing a lot of information that translates opinions into facts (Langer et.al, 2016). In addition, it enables use of different methods. For instance in the current review, the author is able to analyse the findings of secondary data to hypothesis and finally come up with the major factors influencing acceptance as well as make use of primary data to assess the factors on ground. Use of qualitative approaches are not costly and detailed data collection form primary sources are not needed. Desk review is the major form of data collection method which has been seen by many under strained budgets (Frantál & Kučera, 2009). It is also easy for reviewers to assess areas that have been covered in research as well as hypothesized factors in past studies. Therefore, easy to build on. However, it can be inefficient since it relies mainly on other peoples work. Therefore, if other made use of a wrong methodology, the results will affect the current analysis, in addition, it is labour intensive as one has to search for multiple sources to ascertain a factor hence it is a time consuming process. Therefore, it leads most of the researchers to make use of small sample sizes which in some cases might be faced with a selection bias problem.
The design being use of qualitative analysis where interviews and case studies are presented helps in assessment and detailed analysis of an issues. However, qualitative analysis presented lacks actual impact and magnitude of each of the presented factors. Therefore, form the analysis it is not possible to rank the key finding factors into priority for policy which would have been possible with quantitative modelling. In addition, there have been better methods of accessing acceptance including the willingness to accept, contingency valuation, Poisson for multiple technologies, and OLS (Frantál & Kučera, 2009). Application of these methods would help rank the factors on bases of relevance thus making specific policy recommendation possible. With the current method, all factors would be presented to policy makers for them to choose randomly without any ground of preference which forms a major drawback to the current research.
The author makes use of multiple search engines which helps comes up with a representative sample and thus reduces incidence of sampling bias. Use of peer reviewed articles improves accuracy of the results since the articles have been assesses for appropriateness in the methods used and results presented (Harper et,al, 2017). The use of interviews, with appropriate structure makes the tool appropriate for use thus leading to valid results.
Evaluation of methods
The author makes use of interviews as the major method of data authenticity. The methods leads to appropriateness of the results and the research is flexible to change and mould his data collection based on the situation. In addition, they are able to drill for compact information thus receive better response as compared to other methods like questionnaires and mail questions. Through the process, one can be able to get information from non-verbal cues and can control the order of questions depending on situations (Harper et.al, 2017). Therefore, this makes the authors choice of method a reliable tool that would give credible results on acceptance. However, authors would be biased and can take advantage of situations to report their pre-determined results. In addition, the process would be time consuming and would hence lead to use of small samples that at times may not be representative.
The author has a set of pre-determined questions thus ensuring all the relevant and important details are captured in his conversation. In addition, the primary review helps determine context specific results which would not have been possible with use of case studies alone. Therefore, making the results from the review a reliable piece of information with major factors that would widely affect wind technology and context specific factors which form the review are related. This is to mean that the method choice is robust and lead to production of accurate results (Enevoldsen & Sovacool, 2016).
Use of open ended questions are a major characteristic of interview. Meaning the author had the right tool allowing for collection of appropriate information. In addition, the flow of questions is appropriate which would help engage the respondent with a flow. For this reason the tool of data collection was valid and appropriate.
Evaluation of data collection procedures
Data collection was major via snowball to make identification of appropriate respondents. The method was chosen for use since it was hard to identify appropriate respondent from the sample. This led to interview for the people who were specifically affected by the wind technology. In addition, the method helps in analysis of a population which determination of specific attributes affecting it (Harper et.al, 2017). Therefore, the method as chosen by the author provided a reliable source of information since proper targeting was done and the right sample selected was addressed. The results were free from bias of having included people outside the population of interest. However we are not sure of having controlled the sampling bias, and the researcher may not have been able to control the sample as it may be endless. From the analysis and results presented it is clear that the results were robust and the sample determination method lead to reliable information.
The researcher also conducted the review from deferent industries and department sources which helped in triangulation of responses. This improved validity of the results. In addition, accuracy was enhanced as to the report since the analysis was able to capture information from people sitting at different positions (Enevoldsen & Sovacool, 2016). Consequently, a variability in the case would more like produce similar results making the model robust.
In addition, the interviews were electronically recorded meaning that errors were minimised. Also the ti...