The questions we ask matter: insights from place-based research on nature’s contributions to people

Inclusive management requires accounting for the diverse ways in which nature contributes to people’s lives. To uncover the broad spectrum of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) expressed by social actors, using plural methods has emerged as a useful approach in sustainability science. Yet, we lack research on how different interview questions influence participants’ expressions of NCP. Given the paucity of methodological studies that explore this, we investigated the effect of four distinct framings in interview questions (Appreciation, Benefits, Well-being, and Importance) on the NCP diversity expressed by different social actors. To this end, we analyzed interviews with nature conservationists (n = 28), tour guides (n = 20), and tourists (n = 38) at Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. We uncovered 27 NCP. Further, the framing of the questions worked differently for social actors to express NCP. Multiple question-framings were necessary for all social actors to express a diversity of NCP, i.e., conservationists expressed all 27 NCP, guides 25 NCP, and tourists 19 NCP, respectively. Moreover, ten NCP were sensitive to the question-framing, the social actor, or even both, suggesting that these factors conditioned the NCP diversity we uncovered. Arguing that methods used to uncover NCP serve as ‘NCP-articulating institutions’, we claim that researchers can reduce the risk of response omission by purposefully designing their research. Complementing previous calls for plural methods, our results showed that a ‘within-method pluralizing’ approach, i.e., using various question-framings as tools within one method, can also amplify social actors’ NCP expression by drawing on the power of words.