Quantitative analysis project

Quantitative analysis project

Introduction

The 2019-20 Australian bushfire was one of the biggest bush fires ever experienced by Australia. The effect of the bush fire was expected to have a wide range of impact on the environment, politics and the attitude of the people (Biddle et al. 2020). Accordingly, ANU in 2020 conducted a survey to understand the Australians attitude to bushfire and related themes such as environmental, role of institutions and the political issues. Based on this survey report, this research aims to conduct data analysis to find out whether demographic traits such as gender and education affects their level of concern for environmental issues. Further, the perception of the public on the adequacy of Australias role in protecting the environment will also be analysed.

Hypotheses

For this research, the paper has designed three hypotheses based on pre-existing research and literatures. The first hypothesis focuses on the impact of gender on the level of concern for environmental issues. This has been chosen as there is strong evidence that indicates that women have higher concern for environmental issues in comparison with men in many countries (e.g., McCright 2010). As a result, it would be interesting to study if gender have an impact on the level of concern for environmental issues in Australia too. Similarly, the second hypothesis takes the independent variable- education to analyse its impact on the level of concern for environmental issues. This has been chosen as there are pre-existing research providing evidence that people with lower formal education tends to show less concern about environmental issues (Poortinga et al. 2019; Shi et al. 2016). Therefore, there is a good reason to create this hypothesis to check the relevance of this theory in the context of Australia.

The third hypothesis focuses on the perception of Australians regarding the adequacy of the role played by Australia in protecting the environment. This hypothesis has been chosen as Australias climate change policy has always remained controversial and erratic (Nelson 2015). According to the Goodman (2020), Australia is one of the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases with no improvements in its climate change policy. The same concern has been reported by the UN (2018). These reports indicates that Australia is not doing enough to protect the environmental. Hence, through this hypothesis, it would be interesting to study the Australians perception on this issue.

The details of the hypothesis are discussed in detail under Section 5 of this research paper.

Analytical methods:

For the purpose of this research, the data collected by Biddle et al. (2020) to study the Exposure and the impacts on the attitudes of the 2019-20 Australian Bushfires was used. The sample size of this data is 3249 collected from the members of the Life in Australia TM. The data collection method involved reminding respondents to complete the online survey through emails, SMS and through telephone calls (Biddle et al. 2020). The data used a mixture of likert scale and open-ended questions to ensure reliability of the data. The data were cleaned to remove missing responses and meaning less responses such as cant choose, dont know to make our hypothesis results reliable.

The Survey data was analysed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics using jamovi (version 1.6) as follows:

In order to describe the sample, descriptive statistics were conducted to compare the sample demographics with different hypothesis conditions.

Two sample T-test was conducted to analyse effect of gender (independent variable) on the level of concern for environmental issues (Dependent variable).

One Sample T-test was conducted to analyse the perception of Australias role in environmental protection (Dependent variable).

One-Way ANOVA was used to analyse the effect of education on the level of concern for environmental issues. For this, Env_per_index (concern for environmental issues) was taken as the dependent variable and level of qualification was taken as the independent variable.

Descriptive statistics:

The sample size of the survey is 3249, out of which 43.6% are male and 56.4% are female. Further, the sample population are mostly university graduates with 46.7% holding the qualification of Bachelors Degree and higher. The overall summary of the demographic statistics is summarized in table 1.

Table 1: Demographic variables

Variable Attribute Sample

Sex Male 43.6%

Female 56.4%

Age Mean age 30-49 years

Education Bachelors degree of higher 46.7%

Trade/certificate/diploma 28.0%

Secondary School or less 25.3%

State NSW 28.4%

VIC 25.7%

QLD 20.1%

SA 9.2%

WA 10.6%

TAS 2.9%

NT 0.5%

ACT 2.6%

In addition to the demographic variable, other variables such as the concern for environmental issues (Env_per_index) and the perceived role of Australia in environmental protection (C2_ord_only) were used as dependent variables.

Results:

The results from the tests were analysed based on the following result conditions:

If the p-value is smaller than the , H0 is rejected.

If the p-value is larger than , H0 is accepted

Result for Hypothesis 1

Table 2: Summary of Hypothesis 1

Test Table- 1

The above Test Table- 1 result shows that p<.001. By taking the value of as 0.05, we can confirm that 0.001 is lower than 0.05 and hence, based on the above-mentioned result conditions, we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis where women tend to have higher level of concern for environmental issues. The test result in Test Table 1 also depicted a mean difference of -0.069 which shows that there is about 7% point difference in the level of concern for environmental issues between male and female groups. We also have 95% confidence, and the value of confidence interval are 0.080 and 0.059. This means that the mean difference between the male respondents and female respondents is between 6%-8% and as our variable is between 0 and 1, the result indicates that female population in Australia have about 6%-8% more concern about the environmental issues than the male population (p<0.001).

Result for hypothesis 2

Table 3: Summary of Hypothesis 2

The following descriptive statistics were prepared for analysing the data through One-way ANOVA test.

34111091664942Levels (scale) explanation:

Bachelors degree (BD) or higher

Trade/Certificate or Diploma qualification (TCD)

Secondary school or less (SC)

00Levels (scale) explanation:

Bachelors degree (BD) or higher

Trade/Certificate or Diploma qualification (TCD)

Secondary school or less (SC)

The data is analysed with the help of One-way ANOVA which shows the result as follows:

020510500

3888188168851900The one-Way ANOVA test result shows that p<.001. As our was set as 0.001, we can confirm that the p value is lower than the . Hence, based on our result conditions, we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis where Australian public with higher qualification shows more concern for the environmental issues. Further, from our ANOVA result table and graph 1, we can see that Australian with higher level of qualification have higher mean value.

4404995678677Graph 1

00Graph 1

Further, the above post-hoc results also shows that Australians with qualification of BD and above have a mean value which is 0.0205 higher than those with qualification of TCD and 0.0198 higher than those with SC qualification. These results hence support our alternative hypothesis.

Result for hypothesis 3

Table 4: Summary of Hypothesis 3

As per the research questionnaire, Q. C2 asked:

For this, the one sample t-test was used to test whether people in Australia in general thinks if Australia is doing About the right amount in protecting the environment versus not About the right amount. As per our hypothesis (Table 4), if the Australian public thinks Australia is doing about the right amount, then the population mean would not differ much from the 2 value.

Accordingly, the one Sample T-test gave the following results:

The test shows that p<.001. As our is 0.001, the test confirms that p is less than 0.001. Accordingly, we reject the null hypothesis. Further, the mean difference is 0.57 which shows about 57% divergence from the 2 value about the right amount. The confidence interval is 95% with, 0545, 0.590 which indicates that 54.5% to 59% of the Australian thinks the Australia is not doing about the right amount for protecting the environment.

Conclusion:

Based on the survey data, the result of the data analysis found that in Australia, women tend to show more concern for environmental issues in comparison to men. Further, it was also found that people with higher level of qualification shows more concern for environmental issues as higher qualification are associated with increased knowledge on the adverse impacts of environmental degradation. In addition to these, the data analysis also found that Australia is not doing enough for environmental protection which is concerning.

These findings might provide useful information for the decision makers and provides them the opportunity to take these findings as a basis for policy discussions or for future research to bring relevant policy interventions.

Reference:

Bidde, N, Edwards, B, Herz, D & Makki, T 2020, ANU Poll 2020: Bushfires, The Environment, and Optimish For The Future, ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, viewed 14 April 2020 https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.26193/S1S9I9Goodman, J 2020, What is Australia doing to tackle climate change? BBC news, viewed 15 April 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50869565Poortinga, W, Whitmarsh, L, Steg, L, Bohm, G & Fisher, S 2019, Climate change perceptions and their individual- level determinants: A cross- European analysis, Global Environmental Change, vol. 55, pp. 25-35.

McCright, AM 2010, The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public, Journal of Population Environment, vol. 32, pp. 66-87.

Nelson, T 2015, Australian Climate Change Policy- Where To From Here?, Economic Papers, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 257-272.

Shi, J, Visschers, VHM, Siegrist, M & Arvai, J 2016, Knowledge as driver of public perceptions about climate change reassessed, National Climate Change, vol. 6, no. 16, pp. 759-762.

UN, see United Nations

UN 2018, Emissions Gap Report 2018, United Nations, viewed 14 April 2021, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/26895/EGR2018_FullReport_EN.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1