Team:Manchester/Surveys SAS
Survey Analysis in Partnership with St. Andrews
- We considered the effect of the data found by St. Andrews on our project.
- We confirmed the existence of a growing environmental awareness among young people, implying the people value our project goals.
- We tested how aware our participants are of the ecological effects of sunscreens informing how we should tell our project story.
- We matched results on the prevalence of sunscreen use between this survey and our own data, suggesting both samples were generalisable.
- We collected information on consumer values and price preferences to inform and guide the design stage of our entrepreneurship
St. Andrews are our partner team for our human practices and both of our teams have produced different surveys that aim to answer different experimental questions. We agreed that despite this we would share the raw survey data with each other in case any of the findings would be mutually beneficial for our Human Practices. In this section our team has considered the implications of the St. Andrews data on our project.
Sample
- 67 respondents from St. Andrews (UK), Honolulu (Hawaii, USA) and Sydney (Australia).
- 54% of respondents were from the UK.
- 20.6% of respondents were from Australia.
- 11.8% of respondents were from Hawaii.
- Remaining 13.6% of responses were from other countries. However, St. Andrews were conducting a comparison between the UK, Sydney and Australia so the extra results were excluded from the analysis.
- 92.5% of the same were aged 18-25 meaning it was mostly dominated by young adults. This may be a reflection of the release method; the respondents were approached online through social media pages such as student Facebook groups. This may mean that conclusions made might not be fully representative of the global population.
- Survey was open for responses during the period between the 16th of August and the 29th of September.
- The platform used for the survey was Qualtrics.
Growing Environmental Awareness Among Young People
- 73.91% of the respondents said they strongly agreed with the statement “the environment is adversely affected by human activity”.
- 66.67% of respondents strongly disagreed that chemical pollution is not a major problem.
This finding supports market data from Euromonitor which reported a rise in the concern of climate change and general increasing environmental awareness (Euromonitor, 2020). This also validates our perception of young people that we have gained from our YouTube analysis - videos discussing the ecological impact of coral bleaching targeted millennials and generation z. Overall, the implication is that our project would be attractive and considered good by the British, Australian and Hawaiian publics. There is a potential for bias in this sample as Australia and Hawaii are currently the most affected areas for coral bleaching. Hawaii was the first country to ban conventional sunscreens in an attempt to stabilise their decreasing coral population (good news network, 2020). Therefore, respondents from these places may have elevated concern compared to the general global population. Despite this the results indicate that people this age have an investment in our project and share our distress for environmental concerns.
Awareness of the Issue of Coral Bleaching by Sunscreens
- 69.57% said that they were aware that sunscreen chemicals such as oxybenzone and octinoxate are harmful to the environment. It is plausible this number is slightly exaggerated in comparison to the general global population, because of the samples' close proximity to areas currently undergoing bleaching events. These results indicate that people are aware of the problem our iGEM project is trying to tackle, this is important because it creates an initial investment in our technology.
- 30.4% of respondents said they were not aware of this and this number is still fairly high. This implies that the issue of coral bleaching should be at the centre of our marketing and the focus of any scientific discussion to help people understand the aim of our project.
Sunscreen Use
- 83.58% of respondents applied sunscreen when at the beach.
- 16.42% said they did not.
We can directly compare this finding to our own survey to see if our samples have different sunscreen habits. We asked our respondents if they wear sunscreen while sunbathing, this is analogous to the scenario in St. Andrews question. In both situations we are asking about the use of sunscreen in an implied high UV environment. Furthermore, often sunbathing behaviour occurs on beaches. We found that only 48% of respondents always use sunscreen and 32% often use it. This equates to 80% of respondents using sunscreen matching what St. Andrews found in their survey. This is an encouraging result because it suggests we were both teams that were successful in generating samples that accurately represented the sunscreen habits of young people. These results demonstrate that this is a potential consumer group for both projects and validates both surveys.
Consumer Value - Entrepreneurship
The St. Andrews' team asked their respondents to rank factors they consider to be the most important when purchasing sunscreen.
- 33.82% of respondents thought that price was the most important factor. This supports our conclusions from our Human Practices where we noticed a general disgust at the commercial prize for sunscreens.
- 2.35% of respondents scored “consistency” 2 and 30.88% scored it 3.
- 26.47% scored “way of application” as 2 and 29.41% as 3.
These results demonstrate that consumers value a product that is cosmetically elegant and easy to apply, this should be carefully considered in our design and requires in-depth market research. Despite these conclusions there is a wide range of variety across the results and no category wins by a significant majority. This suggests that type, price, way of application and consistency are of fairly equal importance to consumers and should be a focus of the design journey. This is not a goal of our team this year but this data provided by St. Andrews will be used to guide and inform entrepreneurial work during project development in the future. On the other hand, it is clear that brand name is not an important consideration when buying sunscreen. This might mean that sunscreen is not seen as a novelty in the way other beauty products are, implying the functionality of the sunscreen is driving consumer choices. This result has contributed to the defining of that project value.
Price - Entrepreneurship
St. Andrews asked how much their respondents currently pay for sunscreen. Any alternative currencies outside of AUD and USD were converted to GBP. A Shapiro-Wilks normality test was applied to the data which can be normal and a mean was used to represent the result. They found that on average people pay 12 GBP, 15.50 AUD and 13.50 USD and each currency had a large price range. Considering that our stakeholders value accessible products, £10 or lower will be considered cheap by the standards that they are currently paying. This data confirms that our project value is appropriate because it is cheaper than what respondents already pay, this also makes our product more attractive than its current competitors. This result further validates our project value by identifying £10 or lower as a good price aim.
