His, hers or both's? The role of male and female's attitudes in explaining their home energy use behaviours

Abstract

a b s t r a c tBuilding energy research has historically overlooked the role of attitudes, instead focusing on building and socio-demographic influences. Even when attitudes are measured, usually, the attitudes of just one household member are measured even though household energy consumption is the result of actions of all household members. This research explored first whether attitudes could help explain heating usage and second whether the attitudes of a couple could explain more of the variability in heating behaviour than the attitudes of one partner. The attitudes towards home heating energy use (i.e. attitudes towards thermal comfort, economical with energy, industry and technology's role and individual's role) of 128 English couples were used in this study. Together with building and socio-demographics, attitudes were examined to explain heating temperatures and durations, which were derived from temperature sensors placed in the homes in 2007-2008. The results showed that attitudes helped explain heating temperatures and durations, even when building and socio-demographic variables were controlled. Economical with energy was the most highly identified influence on heating behaviours, with thermal comfort a close second. In households that included a couple, combined attitudes of both partners explained heating usage behaviours more accurately than the attitudes of either male or female only.Crown

Capturing the Environmental Impact of Individual Lifestyles: Evidence of the Criterion Validity of the General Ecological Behavior Scale

“…On a related point, whereas electricity consumption was-for practical reasons-assessed on the household level, ecological lifestyle was measured for individuals (i.e., the person holding the contract with the EPC). As couples living in one household are sometimes found to report quite differential engagement in specific environmentally protective activities (see, for example, Seebauer, Fleiß, & Schweighart, 2016), this discrepancy in level of measurement creates some uncertainty regarding the actual magnitude of the relation between people's ecological behavior and electricity consumption (Yang, Shipworth, & Huebner, 2015). However, it is likely to have deflated rather than increased the correlation of interest.…”

Space heating preferences in UK social housing: A socio-technical household survey combined with building audits

“…Past literature has identified key factors that influence households' space heating preferences in domestic buildings [15,20,[24][25]. A detailed international review and discussion of these factors and methods is provided by Wei et al [17].…”

“…Other factors (time of day [28][29][30]35,37,42,46,52,62], time of week [42], occupancy [30,37,47,51,54,62], heating price [52,59], awareness of energy use [28,36,50] and attitudes about energy use [25])…”

“…In addition, another recent UK study [25] identified that attitudinal variables, specifically, people's attitudes towards using less energy to save money and whether they believed reducing their heating use would affect their thermal comfort were related to heating setpoint temperatures and durations used at home. The results showed that attitudes helped explain heating temperatures and durations, even when dwelling and household characteristics were controlled.…”

The role of thermostatic radiator valves for the control of space heating in UK social-rented households

“…This paper provides an insight into social housing tenants' use of heating controls and provides zonal setpoint temperature values which could be used to obtain more realistic predictions of the space heating energy demands of the social housing stock. Previous studies on occupant heating behaviour have focussed on owner-occupied and privately rented dwellings [9], [11], [16], [26], [27], [36]. The study presented in this paper targets a better understanding of heating behaviour in social houses.…”