Date of Award

2011

First Advisor

Eric Kramer

Second Advisor

Don Roeder

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to implement an inter-dormitory electricity competition in which students of four dormitories on the Simon’s Rock campus (Crosby, Dolliver, Kendrick, and Hill House) competed to reduce their consumption of electricity. This competition was known on campus as the Llamas Unplugged Competition. The first chapter lays out a background of how this type of competition has been implemented at colleges across the country. The next chapter describes the attitudes and behavior behind conservation behavior and how such behavior can be promoted. In the third and fourth chapters, this paper describes how the competition was implemented, including how new meters were installed in two dorms on campus. These meters, along with the pre-existing meters in the other two dorms, were used to establish a baseline of electricity consumption and to measure consumption during and after the competition. Also, I conducted a survey after the competition, which examined behavior change during the competition as well as participants’ predictions of their own future conservation behavior. The results from the competition and the survey are given in Chapter Five while the final chapter gives a discussion of these results. Although respondents report a willingness to continue behaviors they practiced during the competition, the data on electricity consumption shows these levels increasing back up to baseline following the competition. The survey also showed respondents’ perceptions of barriers to conservation as being more applicable to other people than to themselves, bringing up important issues of how to identify and address such barriers.

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