ALAN and natural darkness survey instrument

Survey instrument used by Cieraad & Dalley to survey 1000 New Zealanders on their attitudes towards artificial light at night (ALAN) and natural darkness at night in 2024. Results of the study have been published in:

Cieraad E, Dalley J. 2026. Bright needs, dark desires: Public preferences and balancing benefits of artificial light and natural darkness at night in Aotearoa New Zealand. People and Nature. doi.org/10.002/pan3.70212; and

Cieraad E, Dalley J. 2026. New Zealanders’ connection to the night sky. Kotuitui New Zealand Journal of Social Science Online. doi.org/10.1002/kot2.70013

The quantitative online anonymous survey consisted of a series of questions related to importance of different benefits derived from ALAN and darkness at night, preference of the mode of ALAN delivery and behaviour after darkness, in addition to some background and open questions. The survey was inspired by studies on attitudes to ALAN, including surveys conducted in Switzerland (Guenat & Baker 2025), Finland (Lyytimaki & Rinne 2013), Scotland (Coogan et al. 2020) and amongst lighting professionals and light pollution experts (Schulte-Römer et al. 2019). These previous studies were framed around impacts of (and attitudes to) ‘light pollution’; as such the presence of ALAN is framed in terms of a ‘negative’ influence/presence. The term ‘pollution’ is universally applied to human impacts on a natural state, with the inherent value-statement that the natural state is ‘good’ and necessarily favourable, whereas the human-modified state is ‘bad’ and unfavourable. Recognising the benefits that ALAN also provides, and to avoid introducing bias through pre-sensitising respondents with a negative framing of ALAN, our survey instrument instead adopts a neutral framing by characterising both ALAN and natural darkness as beneficial.

We propose that Version 2 is the version to use when using this Survey Instrument.
Please cite the above studies when using this work.

Changes in Version 2 - uploaded Feb 2026 (compared with Version 1)
- Contains all the questions that were conducted as part of the study, including demographic questions (which were missing in Version 1).
- Contains images of star counts (missing in Version 1)
- Minor rephrasing of some questions for consistency and clarity. In particular, this relates to the use of "Use of ALAN" vs the "Benefits derived from ALAN".

Details around the survey instrument, as well as the findings can be found in the papers noted above.