Final Report to DEFRA - Jurassic Coast

The method used was a telephone survey of adults living in the six case study areas –
Charmouth, Preston, Ringstead, Seatown, Sidmouth and Swanage. The summary
reports of both waves are included at Appendix 3.
While the first wave survey produced some very useful and revealing baseline
information which helped establish our starting point (see section 3.2), the second survey
revealed a disappointing lack of statistically significant change in awareness of and
opinions about coastal change in the wider communities surveyed. This may be
explained by:
• The conscious decision by the project team to focus on those with most at stake,
and to do so via direct contact rather than indirectly via the local media. This
allowed us to manage the process of engagement without the risk of the agenda
being set by others, but in doing so perhaps restricted the ‘reach’ of the project
message beyond those most affected by coastal change.
• The fact that the large size of some of the sample areas (e.g. Swanage and
Sidmouth) inevitably included many people who are not directly affected by
coastal change, or would not perceive themselves to be. For further discussion of
this, see section 4.1 on ‘Engaging stakeholders in coastal change who don’t think
they have a stake’.
The number of people who attended the public exhibitions (who gave very positive
feedback) was similar to the number surveyed so we can perhaps conclude that the
project had a positive impact on those with whom it was able to directly engage, but not
on those who were only exposed to it indirectly. While it might have been possible to
reach a wider audience via a more high profile project, this may have required an
unacceptable trade-off with both the quality of the contact we enjoyed with those who did
participate in the project, and our ability to manage the engagement process without the
risk of the issues being misinterpreted, misrepresented or sensationalised.
23