[STUDY] Understand the decision-making process that leads co-owners to engage in renovation work

Since 2016, the GAEL laboratory, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Area, has been conducting an action-research project to understand the determinants of decision-making by co-owners registered in the Mur | Mur (campaign for the insulation and thermal renovation of buildings) scheme run by the Metropolitan Area. This study analyses the economic, financial and sociological aspects that influence co-owners’ choices through several tools and methodologies.

To massify energy renovation, it is still necessary to convince owners, tenants and co-owners to undertake work… That’s why, the Grenoble Applied Economy Laboratory (GAEL) proposed to the Metropolis to carry out over 3 years an ambitious research project whose objective is to understand the determinants of decision-making of co-owners registered in the Mur | Mur system to undertake energy renovation work and to solicit public funding.

This proposal is part of the methodological approach defined within the framework of the European City-zen project, which aims to deploy innovative solutions for the energy transition in the cities of Grenoble and Amsterdam.

Research Steps

The first phase concerned Mur |Mur 1 and consisted of an ex-post statistical and econometric analysis of the data provided by the Metropolis, ALEC and Soliha (details of the subsidies paid by all the financiers to each condominium engaged, number of people eligible for assistance, age of the building and occupants, list of condominiums registered at the beginning and of the condominiums that voted for the renovation,…).

The second phase of work, in progress, is a qualitative survey concerning the Mur | Mur 2 system, a sociological analysis of the various meetings in which the co-owners participate and aimed at exploring their collective behaviour in the decision-making process for renovation.

Among these meetings, the personalized study restitution (PSR) aim to inform co-owners of the personalized study carried out by ALEC and validated by the technical committee. These took place before the definition of a potential work plan and bring together all the stakeholders concerned, namely the co-owners, ALEC, Soliha, the Metropolis and the laboratory’s researchers.

Using two text analysis software programs used on the recordings of these PSRs, the researchers were able to finely analyze each participant’s speech in order to find characteristic signs of decision-making. These software programs make it possible, among other things, to study the distribution of speaking time, to identify the main themes addressed and to identify the main concerns of co-owners.

Although valuable for the rest of the study, the discursive analysis of these 19 meetings must be complemented by subsequent meetings between the various stakeholders in order to obtain convincing results. The rest of the study will therefore consist in coding and analysing future meetings with the same software and carrying out a global analysis of all the corpora. As the choice of co-owners to undertake renovation work is not fixed, researchers must wait until the end of the decision-making process to continue their research.

For more information, contact Odile Blanchard, head of the study: odile.blanchard@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Intermediary results