General Discussion

Great job you guys! There are some excellent points made here. To start off then, here are some points I can add:

Possible Research Question: Does education have an influence on the sustainability choices of individuals?

Causal Theory: Citizens who are educated on environmental matters are more sustainable because they have learned what kinds of actions are good for the environment and what kinds of actions are bad.

Our two main concepts: Education (independent variable ) and Sustainalibity (dependent variable)

Our two measurements: For education=what majors people are studying at university (poli sci, forestry, commerce etc…)

                     For sustainability= actions taken by individuals (recycling, composting etc.)

And here is my reasoning as to why we can take the above path: I agree with BenjaminBlack when he says “the 'scientific community' tends to stress the FUTURE impact of global climate change” because his point is linked to the importance of education. Information dissemination plays a very important role in what people know about environmental issues and thus their actions in accordance to it. If we focus our education realm to university students, perhaps we can find a correlation that forestry students are more sustainable than commerce students (no offense to commerce:) ). It also seems like we have automatically defined sustainability as the “actions individuals take”, VeronicaReiss shows good examples of survey questions like (Do you recycle?" "Do you consume locally (GVRD/Fraser Valley) grown produce?" "Do you bus, bike or walk to work/school?") These types of questions would be useful in answering our research question because they would be valid, and validity means how close the measurement is to our concept, and if we want to define sustainability in terms of actions, than spot on. But perhaps we can go more specific and ask “how many times do you recycle, compost etc” just to make the comparison more precise because both a forestry and a commerce student can recycle, but it a forestry student recycles more, than they are obviously more sustainable.

Let me know what you guys think! Thanks and keep up the good work guys!