DATASET - METADATA

TITLE

REFIT smart home national survey

DESCRIPTION

The REFIT project investigated the use of smart home technologies and their potential impact on household energy demand.

As part of the REFIT project, a national survey was conducted to measure perceptions of smart homes. The survey instrument was developed and tested by the project team. The survey was implemented online during September - October 2015 by a market research company using a representative sample of UK homeowners. A total of n=1054 responses were collected. The survey responses were coded and cleaned by the project team. Both survey instrument and cleaned response data are made available here.

The REFIT project additionally ran a field trial of smart home technologies involving twenty households in Loughborough, UK, over a two year period from October 2013 - October 2015. Detailed qualitative data on participating households’ perceptions of smart home technologies are available separately (see related datasets).

These data were collected as part of the REFIT project (`Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools for UK Homes using Smart Home Technology’). The REFIT project ran from 2012 - 2015 as a consortium of three universities - Loughborough, Strathclyde and East Anglia - and ten industry stakeholders. The REFIT project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through linked grants under the Transforming Energy Demand in Buildings through Digital Innovation (BuildTEDDI) funding programme. This dataset was collected under Grant Reference EP/K002430/1 to the University of East Anglia. Other linked grants to consortium members includes EP/K002457/1 (Loughborough) and EP/K002368/1 (Strathcldye).  Further details on the REFIT project and related publications can be found at: http://www.refitsmarthomes.org

KEYWORDS

energy
households
smart homes

SUBJECTS

environment, conservation and land use
housing

TEMPORAL COVERAGE

September - October 2015

GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE

UK

SPATIAL UNIT

No

DATA COLLECTION METHOD

The survey instrument was developed by the research team to measure: (A) general perceptions of the purpose, benefits and risks of smart home technologies, and general issues of consumer confidence; (B) perceived attributes of smart home technologies including how they are designed, how they are controlled, and the domestic activities for which they are most relevant.

The survey instrument was structured in two parts. Part one contained socio-demographic questions and basic questions on smart home awareness used to screen respondents (see below). Part two contained detailed questions measuring smart home perceptions on a 5 point Likert scale (with 5 = strongly agree).

All questions were developed, iteratively tested and refined for clarity and comprehensibility prior to implementation. The survey was implemented online by a market research company, SSI, using a respondent panel representative of the UK homeowner population. Survey responses were collected from 18 September - 14 October 2015.

Screening questions were included to ensure that survey respondents (i) have at least a vague idea of what smart home technologies are, (ii) own their own home (with or without a mortgage), (iii) are >18 years old. A total of n=125 respondents were screened out for not meeting all three of these criteria.

Quality checks were run to identify possible respondents with low cognitive engagement in the survey questions. Quality checks included: (i) straight line responses on blocks of questions; (ii) inappropriate or irrelevant open-ended responses revealing a lack of understanding of questions; (iii) contradictory responses on identical but inversely-framed questions; (iv) unrealistically fast survey completion times. A total of n=593 respondents were filtered out for failing two or more of these quality checks.

The final sample comprised n=1025 respondents. The average survey completion was just under 7 minutes.

OBSERVATION UNIT

Individuals

KIND OF DATA

Alpha-numeric

DATA PREPARATION

Quality checks were run to identify possible respondents with low cognitive engagement in the survey questions. Quality checks included: (i) straight line responses on blocks of questions; (ii) inappropriate or irrelevant open-ended responses revealing a lack of understanding of questions; (iii) contradictory responses on identical but inversely-framed questions; (iv) unrealistically fast survey completion times. A total of n=593 respondents were filtered out for failing two or more of these quality checks.

TYPE OF DATA

UK survey data

LANGUAGE

English

RELATED DATASETS & RESOURCES

Qualitative interview data from the twenty households participating in the REFIT smart home field trial are available via the ReShare data repository hosted by the UK Data Service.
URL = https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk

Real-time electricity data from the twenty households participating in the REFIT smart home field trial are available via the Strathclyde University data repository.
URL = https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/en/datasets/refit-electrical-load-measurements(31da3ece-f902-4e95-a093-e0a9536983c4).html

Real-time gas data from the twenty households participating in the REFIT smart home field trial via the Loughborough University data repository at:
URL = https://lboro.figshare.com/

LICENCING

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode for further details.

CITATION

The dataset has the following two citations, the first for the raw dataset, the second for its first application in a conference paper on market demand for smart homes:

Wilson, C. and T. Hargreaves (2016). REFIT smart home national survey. ReShare Data Repository, UK Data Service.

Wilson, C. and T. Hargreaves (2016). Perceptions of Smart Homes: A Market Survey. 4th European Conference on Behaviour and Energy Efficiency (BEHAVE 2016), Coimbra, Portugal. 8-9 September 2016.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS

title = "Perceptions of Smart Homes: A Market Survey"
author = “Charlie Wilson and Tom Hargreaves"
year = "2016”
conference name = "4th European Conference on Behaviour and Energy Efficiency (BEHAVE 2016)"
conference location = “Coimbra, Portugal”
date = “8-9 September 2015”
keywords = “smart homes, market demand, early adopters”