Re-shuffling the Deck on Environmental Sustainability: Using a Card Sort to Uncover Perceived Behavioral Categories, Effort, and Impact in a College Environment

Definitions of sustainability in social settings can vary widely across contexts and age groups. The aim of this experiment is to identify actions college students classify as sustainable within their everyday context, how such actions are grouped into behavioral categories, the perceived effort and impact of actions, and ways that public spaces can limit these actions. A card-sort, co-current interview, and ranking task was conducted with ten students (ages 20–27). Student listed sustainable actions and behavioral categories were compared against a researcher-generated list of categorized actions possible within their college environment. Ranking data of perceived effort and impact was used to identify which behaviors would be easy and difficult to encourage in college buildings. Key findings are that students’ perceptions of effort and impact varied widely, students categorized actions based on many types of commonalities, students consistently placed actions appropriately in predetermined categories, and that educational environments contain social and physical norms limiting perceived ability to act. In the future, these methods could be replicated to identify perceptions influencing sustainable behaviors in multiple contexts.