Overall, the vast majority of our survey participants rated their knowledge of Feng Shui to be a 3 or less on a scale of 1-5 (One being little to no knowledge, and five being a lot of knowledge on the subject). Regardless of age, gender, or cultural background, a large portion of our survey’s population had little knowledge of Feng Shui. In their qualitative responses, some phrases or ideas that were often present were that of their parents exposure and how their parents used it, but rarely did people say that they, themselves, used Feng Shui in their daily lives. The only correlation that we were able to find is that those participants that responded Eastern when asked which culture were more likely to rank their knowledge as a 2 or higher on the scale of 1-5 and were also more likely to respond to the prompt about their personal experience with Feng Shui.

The reason that we believe that the results we got were accurate is because of a cultural shift that occurred that pushed back the influence of Feng Shui. In China, Feng Shui was once banned from schools by the Chinese Communist Party as a superstition in 1949. Feng Shui was not taught in schools again until around 2008. We believe that the banning of teaching within schools could be a potential reason that even the participants that said they were from Eastern cultures didn’t have as much knowledge about Feng Shui as expected. There was an entire generation of parents that went through schooling without being taught about the ancient art of Feng Shui. If this generation didn’t learn the practices from older family members, its probable to assume that they wouldn’t have taught their children much about it as well.
The United States, on the other hand, introduced the American Feng Shui Institute in Los Angeles, CA in 1991--which was the first time that Feng Shui was officially brought over the the United States. Due to this limited time of exposure, we believe that this is correlating with the results received from survey participants from Western cultures. Having this idea in the United States for only 27 years, it’s not surprising that many people don’t know a lot about Feng Shui and its positive effects.