Rethinking, Rethinking Ethical Consumerism

How we pivoted our research methodology during COVID-19

Danielle Tucker, 12th October 2020

In February 2020, our research team received funding from Eastern ARC to continue our work on rethinking ethical consumerism. Like so many other research projects this year, in March COVID-19 caused us to rethink our research methodology. Here we explain our thought process for doing this and share with you some of the unexpected insights and compromises which resulted from this shift.

Research objectives:

1. To understand the household decision making journey of single-use plastics

2. To understand the approaches which institutions have used to drive behaviour change

3. To understand possible intervention points in the household decision making journey for achieving SDG12

Our research was designed to address our research questions from two angles: institutional approaches and also the household decisions.

To study the institutional approaches we would conduct desk research to collate and evaluate institutional…