Human Fieldwork

Question 1

What is the title of our Human Fieldwork Enquiry?

Answer 1

To investigate climate change mitigation in purbeck.

Question 2

What is the hypothesis of our Human Fieldwork Enquiry?

Answer 2

The community of Purbeck actively support the switch to renewable energy.

Question 3

What was the location for the human fieldwork enquiry and what justification is there for it?

Answer 3

Swanage:
- interesting demographic with high % elderly and wealthy. Wanted to see how this affected support for EVs and investment in clean tech.
- large population size and density which is good for a two hour window of surveying
- it has an AONB which could impact the introduction of renewables
- a proposed offshore wind farm was rejected which shows knowledge and opinions on renewables.
-overall a safe area to be in.

Question 4

What was the risk assessment for our human fieldwork?

Answer 4

• risks of road traffic incidents were mitigated by students conducting questionnaires in pedestrianised parts and teachers carried first aid kits just in case.
• risks of dangerous people were mitigated by minimum group sizes of three.

Question 5

How does NIMBYism relate to our human fieldwork enquiry?

Answer 5

• Not In My Back Yard refers to the concept where people straight away reject the in this case renewable energy changes that happen near their home.
• this can be rightly or wrongly due to noise/ view pollution of wind or solar farms.

Question 6

How does the Climate Change Act 2008 link to the human fieldwork project?

Answer 6

• legally commits the uk to reach net zero by 2050
• there is a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in 2030 which could impact the decisions made by the population of swanage.

Question 7

What were the three data collection methods of our human fieldwork enquiry?

Answer 7

• primary data- questionnaires with locals
• secondary data- satellite images of properties to identify % of solar panel use.
• Secondary data- thematic maps showing EV charging points and commercial solar/ wind farms.

Question 8

What was the methology like of our human fieldwork questionnaire.

Answer 8

• we had closed qualifying questions to quickly see who the person is and what type of resident they were. We did this by age and gender.
• we collected quantitative data by asking whether they had an EV or not etc which could be represented by pie/ bar charts.

Question 9

How effective was the questionnaire data presentation?

Answer 9

• we presented the closed question data in pie, bar and stacked bar charts which gave a quantity to show the amount of local support for renewable energy.
  
  • we found it hard, using out approach, to represent the open ended questions.
• using Microsoft Excel we reduced the risk of human error.

Question 10

What was the effectiveness of the collection and representation of our satellite images?

Answer 10

-Using printed out satellite images of a sample in Swanage, we counted the number of houses that had solar panels installed out of the total there to work out an estimate for the percentage.
- it wasn’t very effective because the images were quite blurry and it was hard to make out the difference between conservatives and panels which would lead to an overestimate.