Replicating Residential Sustainability Study in Urban India

Despite the global nature of problems such as rapid depletion of fossil fuels and water resources, most of the solutions being developed to address these issues are based on studies done in the developed world. We conducted a study of energy, water and fuel conservation practices in urban India, replicating the work of Dillahunt et al., a qualitative study that explored the current practices, beliefs and attitudes of low-income households in two distinct U.S. locations. We used the same method, a photo-elicitation interview study, with 11 participants living in Bangalore and Hyderabad, India. Our study highlights deep conservation actions, which were influenced by the cultural context and different from the original work. Participants in our study shared motivations to conserve with participants in the previous study including scarcity, money, comfort and religion. The purpose of this paper is to shed insight on our replication study. We discuss the purpose for conducting the replication study and describe the procedures we followed; we also provide information regarding access to procedures and data analysis techniques used from the original study. We discuss subtle differences in our procedure and how this may have affected our results and discuss key findings from our replication. Presented at RepliCHI2013. Copyright © 2013 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. Mohit Jain