Team members: Kyle Mezrahi, Berkly Martell, Summer Watkins, Shoshana Rybeck, and Jesse Milman
Procedure
Although the assignment reads “…form a group of 2-4 people”, Professor Proctor gave us permission to form a group of five. The main goal of this surveying assignment was to understand how the various people of Portland, Oregon perceive the importance of climate change. Different groups either had to go to downtown Portland or the periphery of Portland, like Beaverton. Our group decided to head to downtown Portland and conduct results there.
“What do you first think of when you hear the phrase ‘climate change’? What pops into mind?” is an example of the questions we were ready to ask, heading downtown on the Pioneer Express. As we stepped off the bus, we realized as a group we need to formulate a plan in order to survey most effectively. We decided to go to dinner and have some sushi. As we sat around the table for the first time as a group, we discussed different methods of how to survey. We brought up ideas such as surveying people outside of hotels, outside of theatres and malls, and around the streets. The logic was to catch people who are not from downtown Portland because we were not able to reach the outskirts of the city’s more rural areas. Our group wanted to diversify our answers as much as possible. By surveying people while in transit between these locations, we were able to catch some local’s opinions as well.
Mobile devices in hand, we grabbed our first few surveys. We made our way from the sushi restaurant to the Portland Theater. We arrived at the perfect moment; a surge of people were waiting to see the Portland symphony. The excitement of the crowd and anticipation of the concert put potential participants in a generally happy mood. We found that they were a particularly good group to survey because they were willing to speak to us due to their position standing in line for the symphony and their lack of preoccupation. Once at the theater, our group split up to continue surveying, and made plans to meet at the Pioneer Square Starbucks in about 45 minutes. Some of us headed northeast towards the river to survey the Pioneer Place Mall, and others wandered the surrounding streets with hopes of getting some diversified answers. As we convened again, we decided to head over to Powell’s Books. A member of our group needed to purchase a book for school, and we realized that we can cut down on CO2 emissions by going while we were still downtown, rather than making a separate trip out to Powell’s later. On the way to Powell’s, however, we made a quick stop at a food truck; apparently the sushi was not enough.
To our advantage, someone was waiting to receive his Thai food order. The man had a thick accent, and he explained to us that he was from Pakistan. At this point, we were able to take the opportunity to ask this man about his opinion on climate change as a group. By doing this, we acknowledged that each of us had a slightly different angle in asking the questions on the survey. One member asked, “How important to you is climate change?”, while another asked, “Let’s say that climate change is imperative to fix. What do you think that would affect, or not effect?” Some group individuals were softer spoken, and others were more direct. This, as we saw, can trigger different responses out of different people.
As we conducted the surveying part of the assignment, we ran into one problem with our group’s and class’ surveying techniques. There was no real way to conduct random sampling within the guidelines, setting, and amount of time given to perform this assignment.
Analysis
As we started to survey participants, we found that most seemed ready and interested to talk to us about the issue of climate change in both individuals that saw addressing climate change as a priority and individuals that did not see climate change as an important issue. One participant Summer spoke to in the bathroom of the Pioneer Place Mall was startled that she even had to ask the question, and continued to explain that climate change is THE issue to confront, as soon as possible. Needless to say, she was one of our participants that voted the climate change issue as a 10. Kyle found a self-proclaimed Nihilist, who voted the issue of climate change as a 5. Both were very vocal about their opinions and overall, seemed to be happy to share their opinions with others. A few times, we found ourselves asking individuals who were sporting goods such as reusable water bottles and or bicycles. Stereotypically, we could have assumed these people making efforts to be environmentally conscious would be ranking the issue of climate change highly. We were correct in our assumption, as our group data in general reflected that climate change is an important issue to Portlanders. This observation can be very specific to the small group of individuals we surveyed. However, we learned many new things on how the general population of Portland considers climate change, and valuable tools of how to conduct an interview with different people on the street.
Within our own groups data, we did not receive any rankings below a 5 while surveying. With that being said, we only surveyed a very small population within the Portland area, and we found it necessary to compare our results with that of our other classmates. Within the collective results of our peers there are rankings that drop in the 1-4 ranking range (although very few). After comparing our results with the rest of the class, we found that essentially, there are more individuals in Portland that feel climate change is an important issue to them personally. It wasn’t until then that we could consider our results fairly representative of the way Portlanders actually feel about climate change. As the number of participants surveyed, or “n”, increased, the more variety of responses were gained. This factor of “n” helps us to understand the widespread opinion on this issue. By simply looking at our own data with a small “n”, we could not accurately come to a conclusion about the way Portlanders feel about climate change as a whole. As we looked at the scope of answers from a larger sample size collected from our classmates, we were able to confirm that most people feel strongly about the issue of climate change.
National Comparison
We compared our data with the national data collected by Pew Research. Pew’s study was very similar to ours but instead of asking the people to rate the importance of climate change on a scale of 1-10, they asked, “In your view, is global climate change a very serious problem, somewhat serious, not too serious or not a problem?”. From their results, we can tell that our Portland data is similar to the Pew US Data as the majority of the people felt that climate change is a very serious issue and it is of great importance compared other issues in our society today (see figure 6). However, the biggest difference was our sample size. While our group had a sample size of 10 and the class group had a sample size of 142, the Pew’s sample size was much bigger because it was spread throughout the nation. Also, our data only includes people from Portland, whereas Pew was able to get a much wider spread of data because they were most likely able to use random sampling from all over the nation in order to get the best and most accurate results.
Conclusion
During this assignment, we heard both sides of the debate on climate change, and were ultimately shocked at that very fact. We were surprised by the all of the different opinions we came across, from ones of indifference toward environmental issues that produced answers of 5 and below, to ones of extreme concern that brought about ratings of 9 and 10. These results discredited our initial hypothesis that almost all surveyed would respond with the highest scores possible. Despite the surprising fluctuations, our group still yielded responses that were generally positive, and yet still not nearly as overwhelmingly positive as our class’ data. Furthermore, our small group analysis did not necessarily coincide with the rest of the class’ different race percentage surveyed, as shown on the graphs. This comparison allowed our group to realize just how crucial sample sizes or the value of “n” is. We could not make a large claim about climate opinions in Portland solely from our group’s data, or at least it would have been a misrepresented and false claim. From the scores we received and the reasonings that accompanied them, we found the discussion on climate change to be much less polarized than we originally imagined it to be. Our survey participants tended to have opinions, but rarely radical or extreme ones, generally responding with scores in the middle of the polarized spectrum. These more moderate responses indicated just how personal the issue of climate change can be, and how the debate can be covered in such ways to heighten senses of disagreement. As environmental studies students we each came in with individual and shared ideas of how Portlanders may respond to the questions posed, however, from the responses we received we now better understand just how dynamic and personal discourse on climate change can be.
To see the national survey click here.