Class Year

2024

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2023

Department 1

Environmental Studies

Abstract

Transportation plays a crucial part in the daily lives of people and society worldwide. Our study examined the transportation habits and environmental attitudes of both Gettysburg College students and individuals across the United States. We conducted a comparative analysis using a sample from students on campus and a national sample collected from the crowdsourcing platform, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Additionally, we compared our findings with two similar studies completed by an Environmental Studies capstone nine years ago. We calculated each respondent's environmental score to gauge environmental attitudes, derived explicitly from their answers to five of the 24 survey questions. Next, we developed our research questions: How do transportation habits, demographics, and environmental attitudes compare to the data collected in 2014? How do the transportation habits, demographics, and environmental attitudes compare between Gettysburg College and the United States? To investigate this, we surveyed roughly 10% of the Gettysburg College student population, 236 students, and 188 individuals on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Our findings reveal that Gettysburg College students exhibit lower environmental concerns than the national sample. Furthermore, our research indicates Mechanical Turk respondents with higher environmental scores are more inclined to consider purchasing an electric vehicle than those with lower scores. Regarding demographics in relation to residency, the Gettysburg College sample reveals a correlation between respondents who reside in a suburban area and a lack of public transportation use. The Mechanical Turk sample also demonstrates a correlation between residing in an urban area and an increased use of public transportation. Future studies should strive for a larger sample size with an equal gender distribution.

Comments

Written for ES 400: The Automobile and its Effects on Culture and Environment.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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