Commitment to sustainability: A content analysis of website for university organisations

3rd International Conference on Research Methodology for Built Environment and Engineering 2017

生态环境科学

Hasim, M.S.^1 ; Hashim, A.E.^1 ; Ariff, N.R.M.^1 ; Sapeciay, Z.^1 ; Abdullah, A.S.^1

Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Selangor, Shah Alam, Malaysia^1

关键词: Australia;    Content analysis;    Mission statement;    Organisational;    PDF document;    Research activities;    Web content analysis;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/117/1/012046/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/117/1/012046

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

This research aim on investigating the commitments of organisations towards sustainability. For this research context, 'commitment' refers to the extent of information provided by universities in their website which demonstrated initiatives towards achieving the sustainability goal. The objective of this study was to identify sustainability initiatives highlighted within university websites using Australia as a case study. Thirty-nine (39) websites were reviewed and web content analysis was performed to publicly available data including any relevant accessible PDF documents attached to the universities website. Specific websites information was reviewed to detect sustainability themes in the broad university management and operations (i.e., in general policies, corporate mission statements, research activities, positions available and strategies). The commitment of Australian universities was significant and well established with a set of twenty (20) related themes were identified. The findings have some limitations because the established themes only emerged from the websites' content without human validation which possibly weakens the correlations between website information and organisations actual practice. This possibility is recognised and for this reason, further assessment may be advantageous to provide verification of the findings. Therefore, further studies using other techniques are suggested such as interviews or observations for validation of data and reinforce the entire conclusions. An interesting aspect of this study is the validity of reviewing organisational websites for gauging actual practice and a number of researchers supporting this approached as indicated in methodology section of this paper.