This article is of a pilot study with actual responses from 22 households from UK from a target sample of 34 households. The number looks small and insignificant but as I finished reading the article, I understood and actually appreciated this. What caught my attention was this line: “Fuel poverty is a complex and pervasive policy problem to resolve, largely because of the difficulty in identifying and targeting associated households.” This kind of sums up the problem which this paper initiates to address and set the ground for more extensive research for comprehensive solutions. I liked the idea of sharing the actual questions from the first and the follow up survey used in the study, helped me in understanding the objective of the study really well. Even while sharing the results, the transparency with which the profile of the sample population has been shared is to be appreciated. There is a risk of critics actually trivializing the results by pointing out convenience sampling bias and many other errors on sampling. However, I would say that this was a pilot study and the perspective of this fuel poverty group is a good foray into such a complex and deep topic.
Adam Pollard, Tim Jones and Stephen Sherratt and Richard A. Sharpe, "Use of Simple Telemetry to Reduce the Health Impacts of Fuel Poverty and Living in Cold Homes", contributed by Lopamudra Bhattacharyya, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 25 May 2020, accessed 19 April 2024. https://energyrights.info/content/use-simple-telemetry-reduce-health-impacts-fuel-poverty-and-living-cold-homes
Critical Commentary
This article is of a pilot study with actual responses from 22 households from UK from a target sample of 34 households. The number looks small and insignificant but as I finished reading the article, I understood and actually appreciated this. What caught my attention was this line: “Fuel poverty is a complex and pervasive policy problem to resolve, largely because of the difficulty in identifying and targeting associated households.” This kind of sums up the problem which this paper initiates to address and set the ground for more extensive research for comprehensive solutions. I liked the idea of sharing the actual questions from the first and the follow up survey used in the study, helped me in understanding the objective of the study really well. Even while sharing the results, the transparency with which the profile of the sample population has been shared is to be appreciated. There is a risk of critics actually trivializing the results by pointing out convenience sampling bias and many other errors on sampling. However, I would say that this was a pilot study and the perspective of this fuel poverty group is a good foray into such a complex and deep topic.