University of Southern California The research will investigate the influence of urban population diversity-cultural, economic, socio-demographic and ethico-political-on the formation of attitudes toward animals. Attitudes toward animals are critical to understand, because they underpin the social construction of animals and animality by human society. The initial goals are to refine a conceptual framework for understanding urban population diversity and attitudes toward animals, based on current theoretic approaches and a meta analysis of past studies. In addition, the spectrum of attitudes and behaviors toward various types of animals and the dimension of urban diversity which may be related to attitudes toward animals will be identified. Expert interviews and focus groups will be carried out to discover information on attitudes, behaviors and conflict. This information then will be utilized to design a survey instrument which allows a description of attitudinal variation with respect to animals. In addition the research will develop a conceptual typology of local animal management institutions and urban animal social movement organizations to inform the design of appropriate methodologies for larger scale data collection efforts and criteria for case study selection.
