Effects of Fish Species Naming Conventions on Perceptions and Conservation Responses

Full description

This dataset contains de-identified participant-level responses from an online experimental survey examining responses to alternative naming conventions for 16 fish species. Data were collected to examine whether the way a species is named influences participants' perceptions of and conservation-related responses to that species. Each of the 16 species was presented using four naming conventions: binomial (scientific), geographic, descriptive, and figurative names. The presentation order of stimuli was randomised for participants, while responses in the dataset are retained according to the fixed survey structure.

The dataset contains responses from 157 participants who met the study's data-screening criteria. Participants provided ratings of familiarity, affect, perceived threat, perceived value/competence, and conservation support for the fish stimuli. Participants also completed a conservation allocation task in which they distributed a total of $100 across the 16 species. The allocation responses therefore represent amounts assigned to individual species and sum to $100 for each participant.

The deposited dataset contains item-level responses for the substantive study measures. Qualtrics administrative identifiers, timestamps, survey administration metadata and other unnecessary identifying or administrative variables have been removed. Derived composite and category-level variables used in the statistical analyses have also been excluded from the deposited dataset; the accompanying codebook documents the scoring and aggregation procedures required to reproduce these measures.

Data screening included removal of responses that did not meet the predefined data-quality criteria. Disgust items were reverse scored when calculating the affect measure. For analysis, relevant item responses were averaged to form species-level construct scores, and scores for the four naming categories were subsequently calculated from the four species within each category. Repeated-measures analyses were conducted to compare responses across naming categories. Allocation responses were similarly aggregated by naming category for analysis.

Software/equipment used to create/collect the data: Qualtrics survey platform to create and host survey

Software/equipment used to manipulate/analyse the data: SPSS to analyse data