Sustainability at Mercer (III)

This project was originally intended to be a solo effort, but I ended up joining a group in my Honor’s class that wanted to construct a website to talk about the greening efforts on campus. Two other members of this group, my sister Emma Stitt and her friend Christina Hennecken (juniors) already had experience with setting up surveys and so they decided to take on the light survey and make it a part of our website. The light survey they created was conducted via an internet program and consisted of 5 basic questions based of the two pictures of the two different light bulbs:

Which, if either of these lamps, do you prefer?
Would either one of these types of lights make you feel safer on campus?
Would you prefer one type of light over another if you knew it was more environmentally friendly?
What is your gender?
Do you live on campus?

The first question also included a box for survey participants to explain why they chose the lamp they did.

While the survey had a large immediate response (about 170 participants from Mercer within a few days), the internet program only allows for the first 100 responses to be accessed for free. The results from those first 100 responses were very interesting though, and the gender proportions seem about right for a fair sampling of campus (69 of the respondents were female, 28 male, and 3 declined to respond: Mercer’s campus is about 2/3rds female). Another downside of this survey though was that most of the data had to be collected manually as the program only cross compares the data for paying customers.

All troubles aside, this is what they found out of the 100 replies (Lamp A is the normal, orange bulb, Lamp B is the LED, blue bulb):
35 preferred lamp A, 61 preferred lamp B, and 4 preferred neither.
26 felt lamp A was safer, 47 felt B was safer, and 26 felt neither was safer.
70% of those who felt neither was safer, still preferred lamp B
28% of those who preferred A still felt B made campus safer.

63 participants said they were prefer whichever light was more environmentally friendly. 25 said it would not change their preference. 7 said they would not prefer the more environmentally friendly if it was A, and 5 said they would not prefer it if it were B.

78 of the respondents actually live on campus, but even students who don’t live on campus are frequently on campus for night activities.

The basic conclusion of the results falls in favor of lamp B- the LED light bulb. I will reflect in the next blog entry on what more detailed conclusions our group drew from these results.