Browsing by Person "Vuong, Duy Thanh"

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Saving the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta - People's attitudes, opinions and willingness to help
(2023) Ahlheim, Michael; Vuong, Duy Thanh
The unique nature and environment of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta as well as its agricultural production and its traditional lifestyle are endangered by a rising sea level and increasing salinization of the ground and surface water. This paper aims at the assessment of Vietnamese people's information on and attitudes towards these problems as well as their respective convictions and beliefs. Imbedded in an online survey with 2000 completed interviews we also conducted a Contingent Valuation study with which we want to assess people's willingness to contribute personally and financially to saving the Mekong Delta as an indication of the benefits they would expect from such a project. We interviewed three different groups of respondents, one of which lives directly in the Mekong Delta, a second lives outside the Delta, but close to it, that is in Ho Chi Minh City, and the third group lives far away from the Delta in Hanoi. With these three subsamples of respondents we wanted to capture not only the use benefits but also the nonuse benefits accruing from such a project. In the course of the interviews, we found that the Mekong Delta is of great interest and importance to all interviewees, no matter in which part of Vietnam they live. They were mostly well informed on the problems there and had strong opinions on the causes of these problems as well as on suitable strategies to fight them. In our Contingent Valuation study, we assessed the willingness of people at the different study sites to contribute financially to a hypothetical project for the preservation of the Mekong Delta and the socio‐economic, attitudinal and psychological determinants of this willingness. Besides these empirical findings, we also obtained valuable insights regarding various methodological aspects of Contingent Valuation studies.
The return of happiness : resilience in times of pandemic
(2022) Ahlheim, Michael; Kim, In Woo; Vuong, Duy Thanh
Many papers have been written about peoples loss of life satisfaction during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but not much has been said about their resilience after the first shock had passed. Were people able to return, at least in part, to their original level of life satisfaction? This amounts to the question to which degree people had shown psychological resilience during the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis. In this context, it is also of interest which internal and external factors supported a persons tendency to prove resilient during the crisis. Based on an online survey conducted in August / September 2020 in Germany we try to answer these questions. We find that after a loss of average life satisfaction during the first three months after the outbreak of the pandemic in Germany many peoples life satisfaction increased again. Roughly 60% of the respondents proved resilient in the sense that eight months after the outbreak of the pandemic they had regained the same or an even higher level of life satisfaction as compared to the situation before the COVID-19 crisis. Our results show that besides socioeconomic characteristics like age and income and certain character traits, peoples personal experience during the crisis and their approval or disapproval of government policy during the crisis had an important influence on their chance to prove resilient. Therefore, a consistent and competent crisis communication building up trust in governments crisis management capacity is essential for peoples resilience in a crisis.