Analysing practices, social representations and behaviours of socio-hydro systems' actors

This working paper presents and discusses the approaches and methods used by the PRECOS Team of the G-Eau research unit to analyse practices, social representations and behaviours of socio-hydro systems' actors. Four groups of methods are presented: 1) surveys, interviews, and focus groups, 2) stated preferences, 3) experimental economics, 4) hybrid methods. A wide literature review is provided for each group of methods, facilitating a better understanding of the tools proposed. Through examples and concrete applications, the methods are compared and their advantages and limitations discussed. The paper concludes that there is no ideal method for the analysis of actors' practices, social representations and behaviours in socio-hydro systems, and suggests moving in the direction of transversality and interdisciplinarity, by adapting the existing methods to the specificities of the socio-hydro systems and producing hybrid methods that benefit from the complementarity of the original methods.