Automated content analysis of the Hawaiʻi small boat fishery

Marine fisheries provide food, employment opportunities, and income for millions of people who live near the coast. Unprecedented levels of catch threaten fisheries across the globe, while demand for seafood continues to climb. Effective fisheries management could ensure reliable food supplies and mitigate adverse socio-economic impacts on regulated fishing communities. Specifying management actions – particularly the resource extraction activities (dis-)allowed – can be highly contentious, in part because biological, economic, social, and political objectives of stakeholders are often in direct conflict. Disputes over conflicting objectives are typically central to disagreements about the right way to manage the fishery, but often more complex social conflicts can also fuel disagreements. The Conflict Intervention Triangle is a framework that can be used for understanding and addressing three types of conflicts: substance, relationships, and process, where the last two are social conflicts. All three types of conflict were present in open-ended responses on a recurring National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) survey of small boat fishers. To better understand the relationship between these types of conflict, we developed a fishery-specific dictionary that can automate categorization of fishers’ responses by topic and type of conflict. The use of the automated content analysis approach provided a nuanced snapshot of the major conflicts in the Hawaiʻi small boat fishery and revealed concealed conflicts that are often ambiguous and less easy to express. We discuss the performance of the methodology used in creating and applying the dictionary to fishery datasets as well as advantages and disadvantages compared to manual content analysis.