UC Irvine

Scientists and elected officials agree that climate change is an issue that can no longer be ignored and residential energy use is a prime target for reducing emissions. One promising strategy for promoting conservation is the provision of feedback about energy use. Feedback--the process of giving people information about their behavior to reinforce and/or change behavior--is receiving increasing attention due to changes in technology and infrastructure that allow information to be collected, processed, and sent back to consumers quickly and cheaply. Many programs and products have emerged in recent years, demonstrating political and technical potential for wide-scale provision of energy feedback. However, past work has been critiqued for its lack of theoretical rigor; many have called for more attention to the conditions under which theories are successful in explaining conservation.

This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach to understanding the role of feedback in residential energy conservation through four distinct yet interrelated studies. The first utilizes meta-analysis of 42 studies to examine whether feedback has an overall effect on energy use and how this effect is moderated by variables related to treatment, study quality, and publication. The second introduces a taxonomy of feedback technology derived from a content analysis of 196 devices; it presents a list of key energy feedback characteristics and a taxonomy structure for categorizing energy feedback according to these features. The third presents mixed-methods analysis of characteristics and user experience of naturalistic users of energy feedback from an online survey of 846 individuals. And the final study introduces and tests the Usability Perception Scale (UPscale) with psychometric analysis from an 1103-person experimental study; it integrates approaches from psychology and human-computer interaction to begin addressing the need for scalable, replicable instruments for testing mediation of feedback effectiveness.

As a whole, this manuscript seeks to extend what is known about energy feedback and to make suggestions for future research. While there much research addressing whether feedback works, there has been little research into the more nuanced questions of how and for whom it works best. This dissertation aims to address this need.