Indoor air quality: Digital ethnographic research

Key information

• Partner: ClearView Research  
• Amount: £298,368 
• Duration: Nine months 
• Programme: Health effects of air pollution 

What we are doing together

We’re working with ClearView Research and Air Pollution Services to get a better understanding of how indoor air pollution affects people’s health.  

Over the course of the partnership, we’ll firstly be exploring how the design and structure of homes influence air quality. Secondly, we’ll investigate how our behaviour at home affects exposure to indoor air pollution. Finally, and importantly, we’ll explore how we can mitigate the health effects of air pollution inside people’s homes.  

We’ll answer these questions by talking to residents in Lambeth and Southwark, with a focus on people who are most susceptible to the health effects of air pollution. Older people, people with respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, and families with young children as well people from minoritised ethnicities are disproportionately impacted.

ClearView Research will undertake ethnographic research in the homes of 40 residents across Lambeth and Southwark to understand whether indoor air quality is a concern for residents. By cross-referencing people’s behaviour at home with data from air quality monitors, they’ll get a complete picture of how activity at home affects air quality.  

Air Pollution Services will provide technical advice, will train ClearView Research on how to read the data, and will review each stage of the project to ensure it’s capturing information that can be used to accurately measure, attribute and then improve indoor air quality. 

The project will also cover interventions to improve air quality in resident’s homes, such as ventilation, cleaning products or replacement boilers.

Aims of the partnership

By the end of the project, ClearView Research will: 

• Have a better understanding of the level of air pollution in the homes of residents who are vulnerable to the health effects of poor air quality. 
• Have a better understanding of the sources of air pollution in homes as well as an understanding of residents’ experiences of, and attitudes to, indoor air pollution. 
• Make improvements in residents’ homes to improve indoor air quality. 
• Produce a report that will include best practice recommendations for ways to mitigate the health effects of indoor air quality at home. 

Connection to our strategy

We’re focused on addressing the health effects of air pollution for those whose health it affects the most, including children, older people, people with health conditions, people from lower income communities, Black people and people from other minoritised ethnicities.

We expect that indoor air quality is affecting the health of residents. However, we have less data on the causes of that pollution compared to outdoor air pollution. We also have less information about how to mitigate it, how it affects vulnerable people, and residents’ attitudes toward indoor air quality.  

As we begin our work on indoor quality, this partnership will help us – and other organisations working in this space – understand the scale of the issue and ways to improve air quality. This work will be complimented by another project being carried out in partnership with Repowering London. This will aim to build evidence on the most effective approaches to working with residents to improve indoor air quality.