Automated content analysis as a tool for research and practice: a case illustration from the Prairie Creek and Nico environmental assessments in the Northwest Territories, Canada

Abstract

Public engagement is essential to the procedural and substantive sustainability of environmental assessment. Public hearings present the lowest barrier to entry for public participation, but these forums face competing political pressures for conducting appropriate public engagement within an expeditious process. Repositories of public hearing testimony provide a source of primary data for examining these public engagement issues during environmental assessments. However, the time and resources required may be prohibitive for conducting the kind of in-depth qualitative analyses that are commonly used. Automated content analysis (ACA) techniques can provide a rapid, replicable, inductive, and systematic way to examine public hearing transcripts, consisting of the critical development and application of computer programming scripts that synthesize evidence from extensive document sets. This case illustration demonstrates the potential utility of ACA, based on the examination of two public hearings, Prairie Creek (EA0809-002; 2008–2011) and Nico (EA0809-004; 2009–2013) conducted in the Mackenzie Valley, Northwest Territories, Canada. Our interpretation of the findings provides an evaluation of ACA methods and situates its potential to inform environmental assessment research and practice across jurisdictions.