Exploring the utility of Acxiom’s Research Opinion Poll data for use in social science research

Acxiom’s Research Opinion Poll (ROP), a voluntary survey designed to capture detailed information about household consumption and expenditure across Great Britain, has the potential to provide information valuable for social science research. This paper provides a review of the ROP, indicating that the survey in undertaken through a number of channels which enable Acxiom to generate over one million household responses a year. The ROP micro data collected are used in the construction of many of Acxiom’s aggregate products including its geo-demographic classification system called ‘PersonicX’. The ROP is found to compare favourably in areas such as sample size, geographic detail, consistency and data quality and accuracy when compared against government datasets including the 2001 Census, the Living Costs and Food Survey, the Labour Force Survey, the British Household Panel Survey, the General Lifestyle Survey and the English Housing Survey

Why do homeowners renovate energy efficiently?:Contrasting perspectives and implications for policy

This paper contrasts two perspectives on energy efficient home renovations from applied behavioural research on energy efficiency and from sociological research on homes and domestic life. Applied behavioural research characterises drivers and barriers to cost-effective renovations, and identifies personal and contextual influences on homeowners' renovation decisions. Research findings inform policies to promote energy efficiency by removing barriers or strengthening decision influences. Sociological research on domestic life points to limitations in this understanding of renovation decision making that emphasises houses but not homes, energy efficiency but not home improvements, the one-off but not the everyday, and renovations but not renovating. The paper proposes a situated approach in response to this critique. A situated approach retains a focus on renovation decision making, but conceptualises decisions as processes that emerge from the conditions of everyday domestic life and are subject to different levels of influence. This situated approach is tractable for energy efficiency policy while recognising the ultimate influences that explain why homeowners decide to renovate

Quantitative modelling of why and how homeowners decide to renovate energy efficiently

Understanding homeowners' renovation decisions is essential for policy and business activity to improve the efficiency of owner-occupied housing stock. This paper develops, validates and applies a novel modelling framework for explaining renovation decisions, with an emphasis on energy efficiency measures. The framework is tested using quantitative data from a nationally-representative survey of owner-occupied households in the UK (n=1028). The modelling advances formal representations of renovation decisions by including background conditions of domestic life to which renovating is an adaptive response. Path analysis confirms that three conditions of domestic life are particularly influential on renovation decisions: balancing competing commitments for how space at home is used; signaling identity through homemaking activities; and managing physical vulnerabilities of household members. These conditions of domestic life also capture the influence of property characteristics (age, type) and household characteristics (size, composition, length of tenure) on renovation decisions but with greater descriptive realism. Multivariate probit models are used to provide rigorous, transparent and analytically tractable representations of the full renovation decision process. Model fits to the representative national sample of UK homeowners are good. The modelling shows that renovation intentions emerge initially from certain conditions of domestic life at which point energy efficiency is not a distinctive type of renovation. The modelling also shows clearly that influences on renovation decisions change through the decision process. This has important implications for policy and service providers. Efficiency measures should be bundled into broader types of home improvements, and incentives should target the underlying reasons why homeowners decide to renovate in the first place

The Real Origins of the Global Crisis

Housing bubble, Credit crunch, Income inequality, Economic crisis, E12, E62, G21,