Week 2: Rewiring

Hello everyone, and welcome to my third blog post for my senior project! To give a short recap, last week I focused on developing the foundational knowledge needed for my research through a literature review. This week, I continued to lay the groundwork for my future research, focusing primarily on refining my methodology. 

One of my largest developments this week was changing my information gathering process. Initially, I planned to gather data on the personal challenges of adopting solar in New York City through interviews. After meeting with my remote advisor, however, we came to an agreement that relying solely on interviews would potentially limit the simple size of my research. Therefore, I have decided to move to a combined methodology, making use of both interviews and surveys to gather information. Since our meeting, I have worked on and refined a survey that will be distributed to NYC residents and can be found here. The questions in this survey are informed by the literature I reviewed in the previous week, focusing on topics such as financial incentives, permitting challenges, and structural barriers to solar adoption.

Another large decision I have made this week was finalizing the neighborhoods in which I will be collecting data from. After consulting with both my in-school and remote advisors, I have decided to focus on the following four neighborhoods: Battery Park, Park Slope, Coney Island, and Red Hook. To distribute my survey, I plan to hang up fliers throughout each of these neighborhoods. Within the next few weeks, I am excited to start gathering data which will help answer my research question!