Ricerc@Sapienza

This proposal aims at improving the understanding on sustainable energy technology acceptance, by expert stakeholders, in the field of biofuels, to develop an updated social-psychological model. Four features represent its innovative character, in term of its methodological, theoretical, applied, and social implications.
Methodologically, it presents an innovative procedure for stakeholder¿s identification and mapping based on computational text analysis and social network analysis to measure both Interest and influence dimensions within the framework of a real project developing a new biofuel technology acceptance. Previous studies adopted either semi-structured interviews, or expert¿s opinions in the field under investigation, or snow-ball sampling and top-down/bottom-up categorization, among various methods to classify stakeholders and to investigate stakeholder¿s relationships (Brugha and Varvasovszky, 2000; Reed et al., 2009). Such an approach typically followed qualitative methodologies: Interest and/or Influence were operationalised by means of interpretative and non-quantitative procedures. Therefore, the main (but not unique) methodological innovation of this proposal lies in the semi-supervised procedure that will be adopted to operationalise both dimensions of the Mendelow¿s matrix, namely Interest (by means of Structural Topic Model) and Influence (by means of Social Network Analysis).
From a theoretical perspective, the low number of studies conducted in this specific sub-area show that more work is necessary to clarify public acceptance of biofuels. Therefore, the present project will represent an advancement within a sub-area of the broader area of sustainable techonology acceptance, namely the one regarding biofuels technology which presently represents a socially important area still under-represented by social-psychological sustainable technology acceptance literature compared to other sustainable technologies. The final outcome of the project will in fact be a blue-print for an updated social-psychological model of new biofuels techonology acceptance. Combined results from Study 1 and Study 2 will be used to design a social-psychological model of variables capable of affecting a new biofuel technology acceptance degree; such a pattern will be used to theoretically derive an updated model to integrate and advance existing ones (such as TAM and SETA, quoted in the Introductory section of the present proposal). This new theoretical model will be then used by future researches where it will be tested via surveys and experiments using multivariate statistical techniques in order to establish the relative contributions of the various social-psychological factors involved.
On a more applied side, it can be noted how most of the studies in this area (sustainable energy techonology acceptcance) and sub-area (biofuels) have being focusing on stakeholders belonging to the general public, while only a tiny minority of published works so far have been dealing with expert stakeholders, within this area and sub-area. The aim of this project is precisely to cover this applied gap in order to elicit the most significant parameters for the acceptance in the field of biofuels by considering expert stakeholders, rather than laypeople as usual. This is particularly important regarding some of the considered social-psychological variables: in fact, just to make an example, most literature within the sustainable energy techonology acceptance area, when it analyses the bases on which people trust drives their acceptance, it relies on non-expert samples. These studies¿ results typically show that moral integrity (vs. competence) is the laypeople preferred trust basis driving such an acceptance for them. The present project therefore will offer the opportunity to either generalize or limit such an established result with respect to well-mapped expert stakeholders. Of course, this would represent a valuable result in terms of applied implications, because it could for example allow to understand that different communicative strategies would be then needed in order to foster biofuels acceptance according to different target audience (e.g., lay vs. experts).
Finally, and more broadly, this project is socially innovative because its potential applications regards a globally relevant trend: over the past fifteen years in Europe especially, and in the world too, massive investments focused on the sustainable energy technology field in general (including that of biofuels), with the aim of creating an environmentally and socially sustainable economy no longer based on fossil-fuels, by moving towards biofuels and green energies. This decarbonisation of society needs contributions such as the one offered by the present proposal, which can help in building synergies between SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) disciplines¿ contributions and STEM (Science, Techonology, Engineering, and Maths) disciplines.