Dr. Martin Kifer High Point University Polling

And joining us now, the director of the High Point University poll, it is Dr. Martin Kifer.

Dr. Kiefer, how are you?

Doing fine.

How are you?

I'm fine.

So this is the time of the year where we turn back clocks.

Daylight saving time comes to an end.

And what did you find regarding North Carolinians and their preference regarding daylight saving time?

Yeah, we don't have a majority in favor of anything except changing the current system.

We usually find about 40 percent, 40 some percent of people who say that they would like permanent daylight saving time, which is, you know, what we're going back to.

Right.

And how many said that they would prefer to year-round standard time?

A smaller percentage.

Usually we find, you know, about a quarter to a third say stay with the current system and then it's in the tens or teens, the people who would like to go to standard time permanently.

Right.

And the benefits to this kind of vary, I would imagine, because...

You know, there is a financial impact and incentive for all this, though,

right? Yeah, that's right.

I mean, part of it has to do with when we ask the different experts on High Point University campus.

I do the polls, but we've got nurses and we've got economists and other people who comment.

And what we find is they focus on the disruption it causes.

The cost happens to people because their circadian rhythms are disrupted, and that can have all kinds of health implications.

But there are some hypothesized savings that would come if you went one way or another in terms of saving energy because you wouldn't have to have as much lighting and so forth.

Yeah, and it's interesting hearing from folks who want to change this system because we actually did go back and I think it was just before I was born, as a matter of fact, in 1973, I think it was the year where they actually tried to go year-round daylight savings time and it didn't work out well because people had to show up, you know, school kids were showing up in the dark waiting for their buses and after a while, after about a year of that, they just went ahead and eliminated it, right? Yeah.

Yeah, well, that's one of the things that people worry about, that if you went to permanent daylight saving time, that you would have those early mornings that would be darker, you know, as we're going toward winter, and that may not be as good for the kids.