Analyzing & Visualizing Data : Survey Project

LaMar D. Brown PhD, MBA

Executive PHD in Information Technology

University of the Cumberlands

ITS 530 Data Visualization

Survey Project

Abstract

This paper tries to understand the usage of plastic and the underlying reasons for why people use one-

time plastic. The idea was to create a survey on the plastic usage by focusing the questions on

preferences of people, awareness of people. Environmental factors, willingness of people to avoid

plastic, how responsible they feel towards out environment etc.. Analysis was done on understanding

how to understand people’s mindset for using plastic and what can be done to reduce the usage of

plastic in order to improve the environment.

Creating the Survey

In order to create the survey, I first researched on the issues with using plastic. I tried to understand the

harmful effects plastic causes to the environment and wild life. After gaining good amount of knowledge

on plastic usage and its after effects, I started designing the questions for my survey.

I tried to divide the survey into 3 parts. First to understand the demographics of the people, I had

questions on gender, age, education, employment, etc. second I tried to understand the day to day

usage of plastic by the respondents and for that I had questions on whther they use one time plastic

bottles, if they use refillable containers, if they are likely to avoid using plastic, how guilty they feel of

using plastic, some of the reasons they don’t use a refillable container, their opinion on plastic usage.

Third, after questioning the respondents on their plastic usage, I tried to get a sense of the knowledge

they have on the impact of plastic on environment, to understand reasons of using one-time plastic, if

they can provide suggestions on how to avoid plastic, and what other alternative ideas they have.

By dividing the survey into 3 parts, my intent was to understand the plastic usage habits of people while

also understanding how they feel about using something that harms the environment and wild life. The

whole survey was designed to make people think and be cautious on the impact they make on the

environment and for those who have no idea, this survey was meant to educate themselves.

Part 2: Administering your Survey

Once the survey questionnaire was created, I reached out to friends and family via email and messaging

apps. I created a short description of what the survey is and gave clear instructions on how to access the

survey and respond to the survey questions. I gave the respondents enough time to take the survey

while also reaching out to them once a week to follow up on whether they got a chance to look at the

survey. Most of them responded positively and I was able to collect enough responses to start the

analysis.

Part 3 & 4: Analyzing your Survey Results and Part 4: Creating Data Visualizations

After receiving the survey results, initially I had to look at the data to understand what the data

represents. I had to perform some data cleaning because the respondents choose to answer the “Type

your answer” questions in different formats. For instance, fpr the question “Write an estimated

percentage of plastic that you think is recycled”, few respondents answered in percentage format, few

gave a whole number, few gave decimal answers and few others provided a range. So, in cases like

thses, I had to review the data and transform the data to make sure that the entire column had the

same data type which was percentage in this scenario.

Demographics Analysis:

The first few questions of the survey focussed on understanding the demograpic information of the

respondents. And below are the findings:

Out of 31 respondents to the survey, 58.1% percent of them were Female and 41.9% were Male.

Among those responded, about 64.5% belonged to the age group of 25-34 years, 19.4% belonged to the

age group:18-24, 12.9% beonged to the age group 35-44 and about 1.8% belonged to the 45-54 age

group.

Most of the respondents had a Higher education degree. Almost 93.5% had a higher education.

Of those responded, 74.2 % of them were employed, 12.9%were unemployed and 12.9% were students.

The above pie charts give us a sense of how the respondents demographics look like.

Plastic Usage Analysis:

One of the survey question was to understand if people use plastic and of the people who use

plastic if they think that they can avoid using plastic completely. The below stacked column

chart shows that out of 31 respondents, 28 respondents use plastic while 3 donot.

And of the 28 who use plastic, 18 think that they can completely avoid using plastic where 10 of

them are still uncertain. This shows that majority of the plastic users are willing to avoid plastic

if there are other alternatives.

Next was to find out how do males and females feel about using plastic. One of the questions

was how guilty do you feel using one-time use plastic. And the below column chart shows that

on avergae, females felt more guilty than males. Females gave 8.5 out of 10 whereas males were

at 7.3 out of 10 in the guilty scale.

After understanding how people are willing to avoid plastic and also their guilty scale for using one time

use plastic. I wanted to see how these two combined looked like. So, I tried to grpah a bar chart to how

guilty people were of using one-time plastic when compared to their likeliness to avoid using plastuc

completely. The below bar chart shows that, out of respondents who said they can avoid using plastic,

on a scale of 10, on average they are 8.7 guilty of purchasing throwaway bottles and 8.3 willing to avoid

plastic completely. Wherears among those who were uncertain, 65% of them were guilty of purchasing

throwaway bottles and 70% want to avoid using plastic.

From the above graphs it is clear that even among the participants who were uncertain about whether

they can avoid using plastic, most of them felt guilty and are willing to avoid using plastic if there are

alternative means. So this seemed to be a postive sign. Next part of the analysis is to understand what

motivates people to avoid plastic and to raise awareness on the harmful affects of plastic on

environment and wild life.

From the below Donut chart, we can see that of the 31 respndents, 74% with higher eductation said

they use one-time plastic bottles sometimes and just 10% said they never use one time plastic bottles.

Awareness and Reasoning – Analysis:

One of the questions was aimed to find what can motivate people to carry re-usable bottles. One time

use bottles are one of the major reasons for plastic and contribute to a high percentage of plastic use by

general public. The below Area grap tries to understand what motivates people to carry re-usable

watter bottles and what are women vs men preferences.

The below area chart shows that majority of the men preferred “Banning sales of one time plastic

bottles” as the reason for them to be motivated to avoid using re-usable bottle. Whereas majority of the

women selected “Free filtered water in restaurants and food courts” as the reason that can motivate

them to carry a re-usable bottle. These two reasons also fare as the second highest opted for both

genders.

The below funnel chart tried to understand how likely people think it is to avoid using plastic on a scale

of 0-10. And from the below Funnel chart, we can see that, majority of the respondents think it is 80%

possible to avoid plastic.

The repondents were asked to choose what they think are the effective ways to reduce plastic. Some of

the options tht were given are:

Produce less plastic, Recycle plastic, Ban plastic completely, Reuse

As can be seen in the above Tree map and the horizontal column chart, najority of the respondents

believe that plastic should be banned completely and existing plastic should be recycled to reduce the

plastic usage.

After understanding the people’s preferences, reasons for using plastic and suggestions on how to avoid

plastic, I tried to understand if the respondents are aware of the amount of plastic that is being recycled.

This was an open ended question and they were asked to give their own estimated percentage. As can

be seen in the below line chart, out of 31 respondents, majority thought 25% of plastic is recycled,

followed by 20%, 35% as the most opted percentage.

However, in reality only 9% of plastic is being recycled every year. This shows that many do not know

the impact of their plastic usage and have been optimistic in thinking that 25% plastic is being recycled.

References:

Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design By Andy Kirk

http://book.visualisingdata.com/home

https://www.snapsurveys.com/blog/10-tips-administering-online-surveys/

https://explorable.com/how-to-conduct-a-survey

http://plasticwastesolutions.com/reduce-our-plastic-usage/

https://blog.arcadiapower.com/15-key-facts-statistics-about-plastic-pollution/

https://www.earthday.org/2018/03/29/fact-sheet-single-use-plastics/

Link to Survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1kTV30QUtN7w1x0tji5FR-

ff6GSQsQPzPyycWszGRAcQ/edit#responses

Appendix Section

Actual Survey (Attached Excel) and Raw data collected from your survey

Data Visualizations (Additional):