Poster appeal in fostering energy conservation behaviour among government office building users

Abstract

Energy is essential for a nation to achieve sustainable development. The need for Malaysia to achieve efficient energy usage was explicitly addressed in the Ninth and Tenth Malaysia Plan. Extended from that, the government has directed all government office buildings to reduce energy usage by 10%. However, the lack of energy saving behaviour among building users still remains a major challenge. Previous studies reveal that visual persuasion tool is useful to encourage voluntary behaviour change for efficient energy usage. Poster is one of the visual persuasion tool. Yet, the effectiveness of different types of poster appeal in energy saving context remains unknown. The objectives of this research are to identify different types of poster appeal to foster energy conservation behaviour among government office building users; and to investigate the effectiveness of different poster appeal in fostering energy conservation behaviour among government office building users. Lights-off behaviour in washroom has been selected as targeted energy conservation behaviour in this study, which is an outcome from a focus group discussion. The methodology for this study consisted of two major stages: Focus group and Quasiexperimental studies. In order to identify the types of poster appeal, energy saving posters were shown to the focus group participants which included the energy saving expertise, designers and representatives from Kota Iskandar. Fear appeal, fun appeal and guilt appeal were identified from the focus group discussion and used as the visual persuasion tool in a Quasi-experimental study. The Quasi-experimental study involve: (i) one month pre-experimental (baseline) and (ii) four month postexperimental (intervention) which was then followed by a one month follow up, conducted in Kota Iskandar, Johor. A control group (without poster) and three treatment groups (with poster) were involve in the observations. A total of 6,750 observations were conducted on the government office staffs throughout the six months Quasi-experimental study, involving a total of 68 washrooms. Mann- Whitney U test, Kruaksal Wallis test, Wilcoxon test and Friedman test were conducted to analyse the collected data. The result indicates that there was an increase of lights-off frequency at the washroom for the three treatment groups while no changes were detected for the control group. The findings suggests that fear appeal has an immediate effect within a short period of time, but the effect did not last long. Over time, guilt and fun appeal were identified to be more effective than fear appeal and their effect were able to sustain after the removal of the poster. This study will contribute to existing literature by revealing the effectiveness of application of fear, fun and guilt appeal to foster lights-off behaviour. Facilities manager can utilise the appropriate poster appeal in fostering energy saving behaviour among the office building users.