The objective of this article is to analyze the quality of the information collected by a self-administered survey addressed to citizens of Andalusia, who were offered the possibility of answering using the post or Internet. The study showed the advantages of using web-based self-administered questionnaires. Web surveys showed a low number of unanswered questions, more detailed answers to open questions, and longer answers to questions than those generated from paper questionnaires. The five open questions with text showed longer answers from the web survey, around 63 characters more. In the open questions with numerical answers, the use of drop-box (select list) generated better response than the use of a blank space left in the paper questionnaire.

The first phase of any socio-environmental impact assessment is the detailed investigation of the context where the project is to be carried out. How best to articulate this context into socioenvironmental dimensions and indicators has long been the subject of complex debates in the field. This paper attempts to advance this articulation, suggesting a number of contextual indicators based on the principal theories embracing environmental multidimensionality in measuring systems. We discuss the indicators chosen and the issues encountered in building this approach. Subsequently we assess the capacity of this set of contextual indicators to afford insights into the particularities of the golf-coursebased tourist-urban development model (GBP). We set out to test the hypothesis that local contexts can be distinguished from each other via the impacts of the GBP model. To this end we perform a main components analysis of 16 socio-environment context indicators, using municipal data from a total of 59 coastal municipalities, i.e. the whole coast of Andalusia (Spain). Our findings show with acceptable clarity that the local socio-environmental context is marked by the development of GBP, revealing a battery of factors that, in the geopolitical area studied (Spain, south-west Europe), are especially sensitive to this type of tourist-urban development. Keywords: socio-environmental impact assessment, development projects, golf, tourism, local context analysis, Spain. INTRODUCTIONAmong the salient issues which any socio-environmental impact assessment study (SEIA) has to address is the complexity of the context where the project (road, hydro-electric dam/ plant, mining development, etc.) will be carried out. In-depth knowledge of this context is essential for appropriate impact assessment, since each development project is distinct from all others: differences in scope or field, type of project, size, location, etc., make no two schemes identical.The gradual increase of SIA studies in projects has placed the issue of complexity on the decision-makers' table. Currently SIAs are shifting from a positivist, engineering-based model towards a constructivist one [1], i.e. from a type of research design based on the application of general, standardised models (a deductive approach) towards one which is more tailor-made for each project, laying more stress on the phases of detailed exploration of the social context (geographical, sociological, historical, economic, demographic, cultural, etc.) and embracing participatory methodologies which bring stakeholders into the actual design and implementation of the project. However, developers, public administrators and politicians (the principal decision-makers) all share the prevailing engineering-based model of analysis, with its practitioners and traditional methodological grounding [2]. In the end, it is the scientific-technological models which, in our global culture, are legitimised to address social and historical problems. Thus, a clear challenge arises for SEIA: how to...