Purchasing Energy Efficient Appliances: A Qualitative Investigation using Text Analysis

Abstract

This study was undertaken to understand individual residential behavior towards awareness of Energy Efficient Appliances (EEA) and most commonly held interpretations of star ratings on household appliances. Using a qualitative study approach, 31 personal interviews were conducted with selected individuals across varied demographics. The qualitative responses were transcribed and analyzed using methods of text analysis using the R statistical software along with the Python based Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK). Our main findings suggest that there is significant awareness of the need for using star-rated appliances and energy saving devices. Conclusions were drawn by analyzing the top features in the text, along with analysis of bigrams. Further, sentiment analysis on the sentences containing the words “appliance” and “star-rated” reveal more positive sentiments than negative thereby suggesting that users of EEAs are satisfied with the performance of such appliances. Finally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques along with the method of concordances showed that consumers are well aware of the benefits of using EEA, and identify star ratings as quality indicators of the appliance. Text network analysis reveals that consumers strongly associate energy efficiency with appliances that are covered under the mandatory labeling program. We find that while consumers are aware that use of EEAs lead to energy savings, they are unable to quantify the said savings. Higher adoption of such appliances can be ensured if the consumer is directly able to estimate the exact savings in monthly electricity bills, at the time of purchase, which is currently not the practice. It is also recommended that more appliances should be brought under the mandatory labeling program, such that adoption of EEAs can be accelerated.