It is already week 2,
time does really fly when you’re having fun! I can’t help but repeat myself
when I say I am learning a lot this summer. Zach taught me how to cast a
fishing rod, I canoed on a river for the first time, and did you know that
green stems grow from garlic bulbs? (They’re called scapes and make a great
addition to pesto sauce).
On a more serious note, I’ve been working with Zach and Elle on the practical details of our field research project, from figuring out different ways of distributing our survey to discussing what information we should obtain from people. The goal of the project is to determine how much recreational water users value Lake Menomin and Lake Chetek. Public lakes are not items sold and bought in a market setting, so there is no observable price which can explicitly tell us how much they’re worth. To overcome this problem, we plan to use revealed preference method that economists have developed to measure people’s value for nonmarket goods. We ask participants the length of time they spent on the lake, miles they travelled to arrive at the lake, amount spent on gas/food/lodging etc, and if they would return to the lake for another similar trip. Answers to these questions are what will help us put a price tag on the recreational benefits of Lake Menomin and Lake Chetek.
On a more serious note, I’ve been working with Zach and Elle on the practical details of our field research project, from figuring out different ways of distributing our survey to discussing what information we should obtain from people. The goal of the project is to determine how much recreational water users value Lake Menomin and Lake Chetek. Public lakes are not items sold and bought in a market setting, so there is no observable price which can explicitly tell us how much they’re worth. To overcome this problem, we plan to use revealed preference method that economists have developed to measure people’s value for nonmarket goods. We ask participants the length of time they spent on the lake, miles they travelled to arrive at the lake, amount spent on gas/food/lodging etc, and if they would return to the lake for another similar trip. Answers to these questions are what will help us put a price tag on the recreational benefits of Lake Menomin and Lake Chetek.
As for logistics, we
plan to visit boat launches at those lakes couple times and hand out our survey
to people before they go out to the water. They’ll have the option to fill it
out at site, at home and return it with a pre-stamped envelope we provide, or
online through Qualtrics if they give us their email addresses. I’ve worked with
datasets that are available online but never actually gathered my own data by
surveying people. This Sunday we are visiting Lake Chetek if it doesn’t rain
too hard, so I look forward to collecting data soon firsthand and hope I can
approach/talk to people without being too annoying.
As we make progress on
this project and the policy analysis project (which we will begin soon after
our 1st survey day), I hope to better understand how an economist decides on
specification and functional form when trying to build the best regression
model possible. I also want to become more “fluent” in Stata, a popular
statistical software, by observing how Zach cleans/analyzes large datasets and
practicing commands on my own. Our projects have a lot of potential for me to
learn about the research process but also for townspeople to learn about the
possible benefits from the lakes.
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