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In this study, the adoption of quantitative methods not only is influenced by the

researcher’s philosophical assumptions and the gaps in the extant literature, but also, to a large extent, it reflects the practical problems in the fields of climate change adaptation, experiential climate change, monitored climate change and climate change health risk

perception research. Before explaining the methodological choice, it is apposite here to introduce the research history of this study.

As has been discussed earlier in this chapter, although a huge amount of empirical research has been conducted in the field of climate change research, particularly climate change modelling, there is a dearth of quantitative evidence on the relationships among different compositional and contextual factors and how they relate to barriers to climate change adaptation, experiential climate change and public perception of human health risks of climate change. Hitherto, empirical work on the relationship between

compositional and contextual factors and climate change outcomes has been mainly qualitative. The emphasis has been on characterizing the nature of the relationships among these factors. One of the factors that limit quantitative empirical research in this regard is that there are no widespread accepted models that can serve the purpose of measuring compositional and contextual factors and linking these set of factors among individuals and social groups with climate change adaptation outcomes. Therefore, in an attempt to build up an appropriate conceptual model to investigate the relationship between collective factors (composition and context) on the one hand, and barriers to climate change adaptation, experiential climate change and public perception of climate change as a human health risk, I conducted an exploratory case study regarding climate change adaptation at the local level in Ghana prior to this study, and introduced an independent composition-context effect model based on the findings of the case study. Then, because the literature identifies coastal communities in sub-Saharan Africa as most-at-risk to the impacts of climate change, I wanted to further examine the

relationship between the nested composition-context effect model and barriers to climate change adaptation exclusively in coastal communities in Tanzania using quantitative approaches.

Previous works suggest that there are two main ways to collect quantitative data in the investigation of climate change-environment-human health association. One is to collect meteorological data on rainfall and temperature over time. This approach has been the method of choice particularly in the natural sciences and physical geography. Given that this kind of credible data were readily available from the office of the Vice President of

the United Republic of Tanzania, I accessed and used it in this study. Another approach is to use population health registers across time and link it to changes in climate variables across time. However, this method of data collection is very time consuming and costly, and also heavily relies on availability of credible data as well as adequacy and

consistency of indicators of health outcomes over time. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the level of available data about disease profiles in health registries in many sub-Saharan African countries is very low in terms of the amount of information disclosed and the proportion of quantitative data. This situation was subsequently confirmed during my preliminary attempts at obtaining such information in Tanzania. Lack of information, to a large extent, limits the variables and data that can be used in quantitative studies, and weakens the generalization of the results. For this reason, some scholars suggest using proxies to measure health outcomes using survey design (e.g., Giordano et al., 2012; Pickett & Pearl, 2001; Schneeweiss, 2014). This way of data collection seems to be more practical for a PhD student than collecting data from dysfunctional health registries, but has an obvious weakness in that the extent to which these proxies capture the nature of human health outcomes is sometimes unclear.

Also, my preliminary search showed that qualitative research is over-represented in the burgeoning literature on barriers to climate change adaptation, experiential climate change and public perception of climate change as a human health risk. Given the above considerations, and also motivated by my desire to contribute to methodology

development in climate change adaptation research, I argue that it is better to use a plethora of quantitative methods to investigate the relationship between compositional and contextual factors and barriers to climate change adaptation in this thesis. Besides, quantitative methods seem to be more suitable to explore the objective of this study and to answer the research questions than other methods.

The core objectives of this study were to investigate and quantify the role of

compositional and contextual factors in personal barriers to climate change adaptation. Despite the lack of terminology in adaptation research, there seems to be consensus that compositional and contextual factors refer to the ascribed and achieved characteristics of individuals and social groups (Pol and Thomas, 2013) and place-based attributes of a

geographical setting (Cummins et al., 2007; Smyth, 2008). In the view of objectivism, knowledge should be a reality that is objective and observable, and then can be measured as numbers. But can knowledge be represented just on the basis of its physical

characteristics? Obviously, knowledge is something that involves human behaviours, culture, and subjective thoughts rather than the purely physical characteristics. Hence, pure positivism which treats social phenomenon the same as that in the natural world seems not suitable for this study. On the other hand, a subjective perception is useful for understanding and describing complex social phenomena, but makes measuring

collective factors (compositional and contextual) impossible. However, measuring collective factors is indeed an important purpose of this study. Therefore, it is better to stand in the middle of objectivism-subjectivism to investigate compositional and contextual factors and how they relate to climate change and human health outcomes. By standing in the middle of subjectivism-objectivism, I recognize the existence and importance of the natural or physical world as well as the emergent social and psychological world. Furthermore, I also accept the view of human beings as social actors (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004). In this context, I hold the view that human beings have the capability to utilize language, labels, and other modes of culturally specific action to interpret, modify their environment, in turn contributing to the

enactment of a reality. With regard to the phenomenon investigated in this study, namely barriers to adaptation, experiential climate change, and perceived health risks of climate change, I concentrate predominantly on investigating how people who are related to these phenomena, in particular coastal dwellers, perceive, interpret and enact health risks associated with climate change. Besides, I also argue that there may be some causal relationships between the central phenomenon (barriers and experiential climate change) and other social phenomena (i.e. perception of health risks of climate change), and attempt to identify such relationships.