UNLV survey aims for insight into sustainability

By Jeremy Twitchell

Friday, June 12, 2009 | 3:45 p.m.

Sociology professors and graduate students at UNLV have begun a valley-wide study to gauge residents’ perceptions and opinions regarding issues of sustainability.

Letters went out to about 2,000 households in 22 randomly selected neighborhoods throughout the valley Thursday, alerting them that they had been selected to participate in the survey. The letters will come in white envelopes with UNLV letterhead.

For purposes of the study, sustainability means “life that is harmonious with the limits of nature, protecting it for future generations,” its organizers said.

Dr. Robert Futrell, professor of environmental sociology at UNLV and one of the survey’s organizers, said sustainability is a broad topic that cuts across several issues, including: quality of life, environmental concerns like air quality and water conservation, and the economy.

The intent of the survey is to build a systematic knowledgebase of how Southern Nevada residents feel about those issues — something that has never been collected before, Futrell said.

“From our standpoint, tapping into the sociological issues and questions that are happening around sustainability is crucial,” he said. “By sociological issues, we mean the collective ideas within the community that we have to understand if we are going to make any headway in these areas.”

Any environmental undertaking or effort to make local development more sustainable will have to involve the community at-large in order to be successful, he said. By understanding what residents think about those issues, he said, it will be easier to engage them.

Because this is the first undertaking of its kind in Southern Nevada, however, Futrell said it’s difficult to predict what the survey will find.

“It’s hard to say,” he said. “At the very least, we’ll have some data that tells us about what residents think. We don’t have a lot of that.”

Futrell said UNLV’s Sociology Department is trying to hone a focus on urban sociology and this survey is an important part of that effort. Regionally, he said the hope is that the survey will provide valuable insights to the local planning boards and government entities and will help them shape policy.

UNLV’s study is patterned on similar studies done by Arizona State University for the Phoenix area as well as other surveys taken in metro areas around the nation.

“I think this is something a lot of cities are doing, and it has really been an important part of their decision-making,” Futrell said. “If we can get something similar here, that would be just great.”

Residents who are selected to participate can expect to be contacted to take the survey within the next week, either by phone or a printed version in the mail that they can fill out and return or complete online. Those who can’t be contacted in one of those two methods will be contacted face-to-face, Futrell said.

Any household that completes the survey will receive free passes to the Springs Preserve, a survey sponsor.