980 Almost perfect Final!

Message no. 980[Branch from no. 970] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Final Adrienne

Hi Adrienne,

Wow! This is an almost perfect final! I say "almost" because there is one piece missing that makes all the difference in science -- the raw data from which we can correlate the variables and look for co-variates. That is a fancy way of saying we need to know WHICH of the people you surveyed answered which questions so we can look for a link between, say, the person who said that "yes" they were a nature lover and the number of planets they use and their carbon footprint. If we don't do that, the data doesn't help us understand how environment and the psychology of behavior are related. Do you see what I mean?

So, for example, we would like to know if Person #7 used 3.6 planets, and person #3 used 12.9 ( a big range, as you have pointed out!), what did person #7 say about loving nature, about awareness of the five simple things they could do, and how did person #3 answer those questions? Where did they live? We should know this about each person. The data should look like this, for example:

Person #7 Food 2.6 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 1.2 Goods 2 Total 6.5 3.6 Planets

Survey for person #7: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East? Mid East 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? No, I walk to work. 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? No, I live off of the fruit trees in my garden. 4. Do you have children? Yes, and they do all the composting. 5. Are you a nature lover? Definitely. 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? Gardening does it for me! 7. Do you have a college education? Yes. Undergraduate only. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Very! 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? La illah allah illa allah! 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? Yes, I use a fan instead of an airconditioner, I eat local produce, the meat comes from my neighbor's sheep, I take public transportation, we use the bath water to irrigate the fruit trees and use the sheep droppings to make biogas for the stove.

Person #3 Food 4.9 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 26.7 Goods 24.9 Total 57 12.9 planets

Survey: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East?

U.S., Florida 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? 150 miles each way 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? Always! 4. Do you have children? Three 5. Are you a nature lover? Only on T.V. -- Discovery Channel 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? If I could, I'd go hunting. 7. Do you have a college education? Multiple degrees, up to M.D. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Global warming is a myth - Michael Chrichton said so in a book I read on an airplane to golf in a resort in Malaysia. 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? Not particularly 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? I take out the garbage on sunday, and pay my greens fees to the country club...

Note that I have obviously made up these answers according to stereotype assumptions that may have nothing to do with consumption!! Your actual data contradicts my stereotypes - you said that ALL claim to have stressful lives and that all claim to be religious. Thus those two areas are probably NOT covariates with consumption, as my stereotype answers would suggest. That makes us wonder "is there anything that truly differs between the low and high consumers"?

Can you give us the real answers for Persons #1 through #10, so we can see what patterns jump out, if any? And then, in your analysis, make reference to those specific values -- as you do, but so that we can see what the facts are and what your interpretation is. For example, you mentioned that the Florida doctor consumes the most, but that your brother in law in Saudi Arabia also is a high consumer, and you said that they have relatively similar incomes. The conclusion that one could draw from this (though it is most likely very wrong!) is that "hot climates make people big consumers." We would have to have a data point from someone in a cold climate and a medium climate to test this hypothesis.

Anyway, your job is not to do all of that, because this is an introduction to the methodology, not a Ph.D. thesis! But you are so close to having what I consider a PERFECT final I would love it if you could just give us that raw data and refer to it in your analysis, and with that you will be a model for the rest of the class and a contributor to the exciting and ever growing library of human knowledge!

Thanks Adrienne, well done!

T