Results Part 1: Views

Finally!! This week, I will be sharing the data from my survey with all of you. It has been interesting having seen the data I have collected.

To begin, I sent out the survey to my friends and told them to send it to 3-5 of their own friends. With the Google form open for 1 week, I received 83 responses. Not too bad if I say so myself!

Within the 83 respondents, majority were a year 1 students (63 of them in fact). We had 11 Year 2s and 9 Year 3s. The unfortunate fact of life is that I know fewer seniors and thus my respondents are scaled towards year 1s like myself.

A pretty good spread of respondents from different majors.

 

All 83 of them believed in climate change, I was a little disappointed as I thought that I would be able to hear the opinions of localised climate change deniers. No matter, after all it is heartening to hear that at least my sample of NUS students believes in our sad climate reality.

Here we have the chart showing how respondent view climate change whether it was a threat (1) or it being beneficial (10).

 

Generally, respondents felt that climate change was a threat. These people generally view climate change as a threat and rightly so. Something about the responses caught my attention, the presence of the 2 outliers.

For the following question as seen below, most felt that increasing CO2 is a threat. Again there are a few outliers, you may ask “Hmm, are the previous 2 respondents among those in the lower ranges here?”. In fact they are not. One of them responded as an 8 the other is a 10 here. It is strange that they see climate change as something beneficial, yet state that rising CO2 is a threat. Could it be, they misinterpreted my survey question? It is certainly a possibility, yet we may never know.

 

From this result several things jump out at me. First the great heights of the “very high” option for  Fossil fuel/Energy, Industry/Consumerism and Deforestation. Secondly, the relatively muted opinion of transportation and agriculture’s impact. This suggests to me that generally my respondents do not recognise the impact that these 2 factors have as compared to the other 3 which have obvious purple spikes. I think the large impact of the 3 factors is due to greater publicity and perhaps they are seen as a closer/more direct contributor of greenhouse gas.

Climate Watch. 2018. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Available online at: https://www.climatewatchdata.org

Here is an interactive graphic I found that shows the relative contributions of different anthropogenic activities on greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally as we can see, formal schooling has played a big part in raising awareness about climate change. Our previous Education Minister has attributed the awareness the current generation of youths has to the education system. From my own experience, I think climate change education has been well woven into many subjects (like geography and even english) and thus may have played a big part in Singapore having such low levels of denialism locally.

Next week we shall explore the behaviors of my respondents and their carbon footprint. See you!

5 Comments

  1. zzuming
    ·

    Hi Li Zhe!

    You survery result suggests that most Singaporeans agree that Climate Change is a great threat thus there is low levels of denialism. I am glad to hear that but the situation in my home country seems a bit different.In China, there are still many people who does not care about rising level of CO2 emission and the threat of Climate Change, although CC has already taken its toll (the increasingly frequent and devastating extreme whether events). There were 3 consecutive typhoons that hit my hometown, Harbin in half a month.Btw, Harbin’s lattitude is 45 degrees North.There are also many “anti-Greta” in China. How do you view her speech? Many of my friends in China are anti-Greta as well, not because they think CC is a hoax. They just somehow cannot agree with her.

    Reply
    1. envempathy
      ·

      Great to see you Zuming!
      I would not dare to extrapolate my results to speak for all of Singaporeans nor even the NUS student population. Yet I think it gives us an idea of the views of those that responded.
      It seems interesting to me that in China many people do not care about the threat of climate change, as from what I know (not much) and your blog it seems as though the government has increasingly recognised the need to balance economics and the environment. Having typhoons at such high latitudes is indeed strange, yet sadly we live in strange times. May I ask in your opinion, why is it the people do not see the threat of climate change and whether climate education is mentioned in the education system?

      Greta Thunberg certainly is a divisive figure, even for some who recognise the threat of climate change. I think some lines of thought regarding her, I’ve heard would be that she is a “puppet” carrying out the agenda of others, others argue that despite the awareness she has raised it has not resulted in any actual change. Yet in my opinion I think she is doing what she can and for an individual she certainly has had a sizeable impact. As I mentioned in the comments in my last post I too struggle with my own individual impact and only can admire her courage and determination. I also found the “How dare you!” speech she gave very moving, I think it was shared by Ms Sarah for this week’s tutorial. Overall, I think her heart is certainly in the right place and that is certainly not to be discounted.

      Reply
  2. Joanna Coleman
    ·

    Hi Li Zhe,

    Great job !

    Here are some things I wonder about, looking at your results. 18 of your respondents were BES students. Were BES students more likely to express certain views ?

    For instance, I also notice that the most common response to the perceived influence of variation in solar output was moderate. That’s surprising. Especially since I covered that in the wk 5 class. Did BES students pick that response ?

    I guess one takeaway from this comment / Q is to reflect on the types of questions you can ask using the data you collected.

    Another thing to think about is the effect of having a 10-point scale and collecting ordinal data. Meaning, if each number on the scale has a descriptor, that’s one thing. But if not, and people are just picking a number from 1-10 representing threat to beneficial, it’s important to realise that two people could select the same number and yet, it doesn’t mean the same thing to them. One way to get around this is to say, for example, 1 = major threat, 2 = minor threat, 3 = benign, 4 = somewhat beneficial, 5 = highly beneficial, so they can more consistently categorise their responses.

    The other piece of feedback / suggestion is to Google the meaning of “outlier”. I’m not sure it applies in your study.

    But again, let me stress – these are just points to think about / apply in future and are no indication that I think you haven’t done a good job. I think your blog is turning out great.

    Reply
    1. envempathy
      ·

      Hello Dr Coleman,
      This survey was carried out prior to the lesson on week 5, there was 1-None, 6-Minimal, 8-Moderate, 6-High, 1-Very High. I think after our Wk 5 class the responses would certainly have changed.
      With the Google Forms platform, the customization options are pretty limited perhaps in the future I could explore other platforms that allow for greater customization or type out scale in the question.
      Thank you for the comments!

      Reply
      1. Joanna Coleman
        ·

        Thanks so much for your reply !

        Yes, this is a really dumb weakness when it comes to Google forms, and many users have commented on it.

        One workaround is to use the description function (click the 3 dots @ the bottom right hand corner of your Q) and type the description in the space.

        Another is to select multiple choice instead of scale as the Q type, and then type your levels as options.

        jc

        Reply

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