Quantitative Stakeholder Interviews

Barriers in the target countries

Here, we will address the core objectives of the project:

• What are the strength and relevance of various barriers for change in consumer energy behaviour within different energy regimes in Europe?
• How can these barriers be measured by quantitative methods?

We develop a questionnaire to measure the strength and relevance of the actual barriers. It will be applied in the countries involved in the project, but could also be used for future studies in other countries.

We are also interested in the choice between three alternative strategies: reduce consumption (turn down and switch off),  increase energy efficiency, and changes towards renewable energy:

• Do these two strategies represent alternative roadmaps, or do they create synergies?

• Is it possible to identify differences between consumer groups as far as these two strategies are concerned?

• What are the main drivers for behaviour changes related to lifestyles, consumer preferences, gender differences and willingness to pay?

Differences between demand areas 

We have limited our research to the three demand areas (domestic energy, household appliances and fuel for vehicles) to trace differences between these. If the relevance of the six barriers vary substantially, than the means to overcome the barriers will also vary between the areas.

We will construct a quantitative questionnaire based upon the results from WP3-5. It will be translated into national languages, and identical questions will be asked a representative sample of 1000 respondents in Norway, UK, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary and France. This questionnaire process will be strictly coordinated by the work package leader in order to secure that identical questions will be asked the same time in the six countries. There will be a European call for tender for this questionnaire. We will carry out these interviews with use of a web based solution to answer the questionnaires. Respondents can then use more time to answer the questions and this may be important for energy behaviour. There are strong arguments for a web based solution, and during 2009 it will probably be possible to carry out such a questionnaire in all our six countries. In addition to the six involved countries, we will also include Greece, in order to cover questions related to the warn climate in the SE Europe.