Ricerc@Sapienza

Sustainable energy technology acceptance by stakeholders is a growing topic in terms of scientific attention and of social impact relevance. Social-psychological and contextual variables determine any sustainable technology acceptance, and some models tried to integrate the most relevant ones. However, such an effort is still underdeveloped regarding biolfuels, which is one of the major options in the ongoing process of society decarbonisation towards a more sustainable economic social development. This project aims at carrying out a pilot study for understanding sustainable energy technology acceptance by the relevant stakeholders in the field of biofuels, developing a blueprint for an updated social-psychological model. Two study are planned focusing on stakeholders acceptance towards new biofuels techonology: the first study aims at mapping the relevant stakeholders using an innovative quantitative and semi-automatic procedure to populate the 2x2 Mendelow¿s matrix (Influence by Interest); while the second study aims at identifying the most relevant social-psychological variables for each quadrant¿s stakeholders within such a 2x2 matrix. The first study creates a stakeholders mapping procedure, using quantitative procedures on big data to measure a stakeholder¿s Interest and Influence towards a biofuel technology: aim1 operationalises a stakeholder¿s Interest via structural topic model; aim2 operationalises a stakeholder¿s Influence via social network analysis. The second study aims at interviewing a small sample of stakeholder mapped according to the first study¿s procedure: representative stakeholders are first sampled in the matrix¿s four quadrants, and then interviewed, in order to textual analyses their answers to derive most important social-psychological variables affecting the stakehodlers¿ biofuels acceptance. Results will be used to design the blueprint for a new social-psychological model of biofuels technology acceptance.