Hey everyone, it’s good to see you all again!
As mentioned in my previous post, I realised that a few of the people I spoke to were oblivious to the importance of glaciers. Therefore, I decided to do a quick investigation to find out what peoples’ perceptions of various environmental issues were! I made a google form and sent them to various groups of people. They were my peers from different courses of study (none from BES), as well as family members and my dad’s colleagues who were unaware of this blog. Here’s a quick breakdown from the 42 respondents.
84.6% of people listed the urgency of our environmental problems as urgent (4-5 on a scale of 1-5)
Individually, I listed 6 different environmental issues. Namely
- Plastic pollution in oceans
- Air pollution
- Glacial melting
- Land degradation
- Loss of biodiversity
- Overconsumption of non-renewable energy.
I asked for participants to rate their thoughts on the urgency of each issue and this is what I found: For the percentage of people rating the urgency of each issue as urgent –
However, what’s interesting was the response I received when participants were told to rank the aforementioned issues by their perceptions of the urgency/importance of these issues on a scale of 1 to 6 (with 1 being the most urgent and 6 being least urgent).
I took the average ranking of each issue and this is what I got:
Plastic pollution – 2.17
Air pollution – 2.24
Glacial melting – 2.71
Overconsumption of non-renewable energy – 2.88
Land degradation – 2.93
Loss of biodiversity – 3.17
This was contrary to what I expected, as from my conversations with people around me, I had expected the awareness around glacial melting to be lower. However, it seems from my findings that glacial melting has the most people (57.1%) listing it as being very urgent.
Despite that, people still ranked plastic pollution in seas and air pollution above glacial melting when it came to urgency/importance! This makes me think that the distinction between peoples’ perspectives of the different environmental issues becomes clearer when people are made to compare them in this manner. Of course, these results are not representative of the general population as the sample size is tiny, but it does give us some interesting insight.
In Singapore, where we are not physically close to the problem of melting glaciers, I had expected less awareness of the issue. Media coverage of environmental issues has also been found to be lacking here, where a study has found that the reporting of scientists’ and activists’ opinions is significantly lower in Singapore than in other countries due to The Straits Times drawing information mostly from official sources. However, in this day and age of social media where information is easily accessible and so abundant, perhaps such information can transcend the physical and societal boundaries that such problems used to face in the past.
My findings showed that people are aware of the different environmental issues, but does this awareness translate to action? That is an aspect that I find problematic to quantify as it encompasses many factors. I think that the different environmental issues are part of a gargantuan problem, and sadly, fixing one requires fixing everything.
In my next post, I shall explore the importance of glaciers to wildlife. See you!
Clive
Clive,
I APPLAUD YOU for writing a thoroughly original and engaging post and really trying your hand at some analysis. Great job ! So pls don’t take my comments as negative criticism. I just want to ask you some questions for clarification’s sake and to get you to think more deeply.
1) From what I understand, it looks like in the 1st Q, 1 was least urgent and 5 was most urgent, whereas in the 2nd Q, it was the opposite (i.e., ranking issues). Have a think about how asking Qs that way might confuse your respondents.
2) Who were these 42 ppl ? BES students ? If they’re your classmates AND they’re aware of your blog theme, how do you think that might influence their responses ?
3) The 2 paragraphs after the bar chart & breakdown of the averages are a bit confusing. Based on the bar chart, it looks like more respondents assigned plastic pollution a score of 1 than any other issue. Based on the average rankings, it looks like bioD loss is perceived to be the most urgent issue. What am I missing ?
4) Your choice of issues is super interesting. As a yr 1 student, I don’t necessarily expect you to have thought about this, but there’s an issue when researchers ask Qs about linked issues. For instance, over-consumption of non-renewable energy is linked to ALL the other issues.
5) Finally, I encourage you to think about open-ended questions. You could’ve asked people “Please list the 5 most pressing environmental problems in order of urgency, i.e., from most to least urgent.”
One thing you could do is write a follow-up post comparing what you did with how researchers have approached similar questions and critiquing yourself. Just a possibility, not an obligation.
jc
Hi Dr Coleman, thank you 🙂
1. It does seem a little confusing if the readers miss out the part where I state what the numbers mean, so thanks for pointing that out! I will keep that in mind.
2. I will include that in this post now! I’m aware of the difference that makes.
3. The rankings were made with 1 being the most urgent and 6 being the least urgent. Therefore a lower number eg. 2.17 for plastic pollution indicates more urgency as compared to 3.17 for loss of biodiversity which indicates perception of the loss of biodiversity being the least urgent.
4. Thank you for pointing that out, I tried to choose issues which were as unrelated to each other as possible, but I missed that out!
5. My concern with asking open-ended questions was that it may have been too troublesome for respondents to ponder on. But I do understand the benefits of asking open-ended questions!
Thank you for the very thought-provoking comments, perhaps I will write a follow-up post.
Clive
Thanks for replying, Clive !
FYI, some of the issues you (and your peers) are exposing / encountering with your surveys (believe me, it’s not just you) are totally expected from inexperienced researchers. And many are solvable through the use of pilot studies. Not that I want you folks to spend too much time and do pilots, but this is a way to collect a smaller sample of responses, examine the data and determine where the problematic questions are. It’s also a way to gauge how long it takes people to complete your survey – and in a legit social-science study, one thing we must do is tell people the estimated time to complete the survey before they begin.
On another note, it is deeply disturbing to me (but not unexpected given what I see elsewhere online) that people perceive biodiversity loss to be the LEAST urgent issue.
Did you see the news from the UN meeting on biodiversity yesterday ? David Attenborough has urged the world to commit to spend 500 billion dollars a year to protect biodiversity, Canada pledged to protect 30 % of its land and water by 2030 and China is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2060. I sure hope our wk 8 class will change a lot of minds and hearts.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918846788/world-leaders-address-collapse-of-the-natural-world-at-the-u-n-biodiversity-summ
Hi Dr Coleman,
My pleasure! A pilot study would most definitely be helpful, and these primary research we are doing are sort of like pilot studies to learn from for our future research 🙂
I also found it disturbing but not surprising that people do not see biodiversity loss as important. I have found that the people around me generally are less concerned about biodiversity than I’d like them to be..
Thanks for sharing the link! I’m sure many of our thoughts are already aligned on this matter.
Clive