Factors influencing electricity consumption: a review of research methods

Research Question: This paper presents a review of empirical methods used by authors to determine the influence of dif-ferent groups of factors that influence households’ electricity consumption. Motivation: The question of what drives elec-tricity consumption is very complex and requires a systematic approach in analysis of different theory frameworks andfactors. In the literature there are a lot of attempts to classify a huge number of very different factors which can be hetero-geneous. The review is built on the existing literature by distinguishing the appropriateness of the usage of different em-pirical methods for collecting the data on the influence of specific groups of factors.Idea: Based on significant literaturereview and analysis of different methods used in this field, the aim of this paper is to make a classification of the most im-portant factors which have the highest impact on electricity consumption. The factors have been grouped into four groupsby the authors of the paper. Data: The analysis was conducted by reviewing papers dealing with households’ electricityconsumption published in the international journals. Tools:The systematisation of relevant literature was used for the pur-pose of determining the most common and proper methods that were used for determination of the influence of differentgroups of factors on electricity consumption. Findings:As consumer behaviour in the area of electricity consumptionoften demands the examination of subjective views of consumers, methods such as interviewing, conduction of on-line/offline surveys, case study and field experiments are commonly used for analysing the influence of cognitive and af-fective factors, socio-demographic and behavioural. For the analysis of the impact of contextual factors that includes usingthe large amount of secondary data, statistical and econometric methods are used as the most appropriate ones. Con-tribution: This paper provides an overview of most appropriate research methods when it comes to examination of the im-pact of different groups of factors whose influence needs to be empirically proven.