Our group decided to release a survey about UCLA’s environmental efforts, in an attempt to discover whether UCLA needs to be more proactive relating to the environment, or if it’s simply a publicity issue.
Here are our findings:
The majority of our survey participants marked that they’re scared for the future of our planet, regardless of their academic background. This is definitely notable because it shows that our sample size of 50 students is aware of what’s happening with the environment, and have paid enough attention to current events to develop a fearful response. Taking action will be the next step, and it would be interesting to contact the participants that are scared for the future of our planet to ask if they’re actively involved in related issues.
Every participant felt that they are impacted by the climate crisis, to some extent. Again, this shows that the UCLA students we polled are aware of what’s happening in the world as a whole, which is definitely refreshing!
92.5% of participants are aware that UCLA was trying to be Zero-Waste by 2020. This indicates that for this particular initiative, the marketing campaign was effective in informing its audience of important objectives.
Above, see the results for awareness that UCLA was attempting to be Zero-Waste by this year.
The majority of our participants are aware of at least three environmental organizations on campus. However, there is still a significant number of people that aren’t aware of UCLA’s environmental organizations. Is this an engagement issue on the organizations’ side, or on UCLA’s side as a whole? It could be that, especially because of Covid, that the organizations’ missions have changed and they simply have yet to publicize it. On the other hand, it could be a lack of publicity on the university’s side as a whole, to inform students about environmental opportunities.
This question was a bit more balanced, showing that student awareness of campus environmental organizations could be improved.
Most people are relatively confident about which items belong in trash cans as compared to composting bins. The majority of our participants rated their confidence as a 4 out of 5, while only 30% said they weren’t as confident (a 3 or less out of 5). Interestingly enough, only two people out of the 53 people we surveyed said they were 100% confident in their ability to differentiate between what materials go in the trash and which to compost.
Most people are confident in their abilities to differentiate between what’s trash and what’s compostable.
Limitations of our survey:
Despite the findings above, our survey did have a few limitations. Our participants were only people we contacted (our friends), most of whom are third year undergraduate students. Therefore, the results we received are partial to third year students, and the information sent to this population. Moreover, because this class is politically focused, the people we reached out to and asked to complete the survey may be more politically active than the rest of the student population. The four of us (myself- Jessie, Haley, Jaime, and Phoebe) are relatively politically active and informed about the environment, and it’s likely that most of our friends are as well. This could have definitely skewed our results a bit, as our participants are decently well informed. We also only have about 50 responses, and the overall trends could vary with a larger sample size, especially one that’s more representative of the student population as a whole. Our focus, looking back, was on the awareness around environmental activism for junior year UCLA students, not on the entire awareness of the collection student body.
As seen above, most of our participants are third year students.
Bias:
In addition, the survey could have been biased through the wording we used for the questions, and the groups of people we sent it out to. The wording could have been done in a way that our participants would be influenced to answer a certain way, which isn’t a consideration we explicitly outlined in our planning progress. On the same note as the limitations listed above, the people we sent our survey to are in our social groups, so it’s more likely that they’ll share the same political inclinations as us. Experimenter bias is another perfectly valid concern that could have influenced our survey and results as well.
Overall, the survey taught us a lot about UCLA students’ attitudes toward environmental activism and current efforts on behalf of UCLA. Although there’s always progress to be made, the UCLA students we surveyed are relatively aware of on-campus environmental activism, which is a trend that we hope the university maintains in the future.
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