Turning Influential Data Points into Ethnographic Informants: Elaborating Links between Population Dynamics and Environmental Consumption

Lisa D. Pearce, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
William G. Axinn, University of Michigan
Indra Chaudhary, Population and Ecology Research Laboratory (PERL)

This paper outlines a mixed-method approach to studying the effects of population dynamics on environmental consumption at the micro-level and offers new insights into the complex nature of the relationship. We use regression diagnostics, performed on recently developed models of survey data from Nepal, to identify influential cases. We then study these cases intensively for insights into why the current models are not explaining their behavior well. Next, we use the findings from our fieldwork in Nepal to inform our models of environmental consumption, adjusting them to provide a more comprehensive reflection of behavior and achieve better statistical fit to available data. The multi-method approach provides an example which can be applied to a wide range of demographic studies and the specific substantive results add to the growing literature on population and environment connections at the micro-level.