CHAPTER ONE ~ METHODOLOGY The information lying within people’s mindscapes are harvested by three principal methods: interviews, recognition tests and drawing examinations (Fig. 3). There are two groups of people identified according to their expertise, and these three methods are combined and applied accordingly. The first group, “experts,” consists of people who have developed expertise in the field of oil through research or fieldwork. Academics, researchers, engineers and site operators form the first group. The second group consists of people who do not have any expertise in oil business (Fig. 4). The study included twenty-nine subjects in total, made up of eight experts and twenty-one non-experts. These twenty-nine people were comprised of people with diverse backgrounds, both from Netherlands and from other countries all around the world (Fig. 5). In order to make more precise arguments, their length of residencies in Netherlands had been taken into account. But still, since the scope of this research is not limited to Dutch borders, this information is used to measure various arguments. First of all, the interviewing method invented by Kevin Lynch was applied13 . The second and third method— recognitions tests and drawing examinations respectively—was only applied to the second group. Since the experts had already examined “petroleumscapes” in detail, they were not asked to recognise any oil estates or to draw their mental maps.
Fig. 3: Methodology applied according to expertise of the interviewees
13
Lynch, Kevin. The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. 6