Coasts 2 - Methods Flashcards
What might make an appropriate location to carry out fieldwork?
Range of features
Size of area given the time available
Distance from the Centre
Safety considerations
What make our coastal fieldwork locations appropriate?
They showed a contrast in beach management strategy, e.g. Beesands vs Torcross
They also helped up judge how the beach was formed - marine transgression or longshore drift
What is the purpose of a bi-polar recording sheet, e.g. environmental quality
It shows attitudes / perspective on a strategy, e.g. type of engineering
What’s a limitation of a bi-polar recording sheet, e.g. environmental quality
Relies on judgement i.e. subjective - need a pre-calibrated soaring system. This makes it hard to compare data from locations
The judgements are weighed - some judgements are more important than others for the hypothesis
Descriptors might mean something different to different people
What ‘geographical approach’ was important for our coastal fieldwork?
Comparison
We compared different engineering techniques at the different locations. Our data needed to allow us to compare
What was the timing of our fieldwork
Between 11am and 4pm.
We started at Hallsands, then Beesands, Sunnydale and finished at Torcross
What were the risks of our fieldwork
Tide times
What could be a weakness of fieldwork methods?
Not enough data was collected to reach a conclusion (e.g. hadn’t collected comparison data for each location)
Reliability - going at the wrong time of day / week / year - if you went again, you’d get different results
What was the weakness of our (coastal) fieldwork methods
Tide times could have made the beach larger if it was low the, and smaller if it was high tide
At Sunnydale, the beach defences changed because money had run out and couldn’t cover the entire road. Our methods didn’t bear that mind, so we just make a judgement. But secondary data was needed to properly understand ‘the story’
How could secondary data collection help?
Neighbourhood statistics data could tell us about the population living in Sunnydale, Beesands and Torcross. Were they permanent residents, how wealthy were they?
The iGeology app told us the rock type in the area - so we could work out the origin of beach material (Schist came from Start Point, presumably by Longshore drift) was
What are the different sampling strategies
Stratified
Systematic
Random
What was our sampling strategy for coastal fieldwork?
Stratified - we chose the different villages.
At each location, random.
What’s a disadvantage of random sampling?
You can unintentionally introduce bias, because you might be drawn to a particular negative feature - so you oversample it, checking the reliability of your results
What’s a disadvantage of systematic sampling?
You might miss certain locations, because you only sample every nth, which could cause locations not to be judged / assessed, which could skew the results
What’s a disadvantage of stratified sampling?
You need to access the background information to identify the right locations to sample from, to avoid missing locations that are significant for answering the hypothesis - otherwise your conclusion is biased / unreliable.
