After Hiatus + Project Abstract

It has been a while since my last entry. The project took me on quite a ride throughout the month of December, which resulted in some changes to my methodology. Now, rather than collecting my data solely through online surveys, I will be employing a two-step data collection process, which includes a large-scale online survey as well as semi-structured interviews with some willing respondents.

These methodological changes required me to resubmit my study to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval.

Happily, I am to the point in the project where I can begin collecting and analyzing data. I will be putting my online survey into the field very soon, and from those responses I will select 20 interviewees to participate in the semi-structured interview portion of data collection.

With any luck I will have some interesting findings to share soon. Until then, perhaps you could entertain yourself with the project abstract.

Abstract:

Although American consumers have begun to demand more environmentally and socially sustainable products, people may not always have the information they need to differentiate between brands on the basis of social and environmental performance. I will explore this phenomenon with a series of semi-structured interviews designed to discern and examine the types of information Northwestern students use to make decisions about sustainable brands. I will also evaluate the importance of sustainable business practices to students, and ask them to identify companies that exhibit these behaviors. I plan to collect detailed data about the type of information respondents use to evaluate sustainable brands as well as why and how people come to associate a particular company with sustainable or unsustainable behavior.