Attitudes About Climate Change: A Survey of Downtown DeLand and Stetson University

ATTITUDES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE: A SURVEY OF DOWNTOWN DELAND AND STETSON UNIVERSITY A PAPER SUBMITTED FOR COMPLETION OF SENIOR RESEARCH FOR THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES STETSON UNIVERSITY BY Katie Hansen IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE(S) OF BACHELOR OF ARTS ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES AND GEOGRAPHY ADVISOR Dr. Jason M. Evans, Ph.D. MAY 2017 Table of Contents List of Illustrations ii List of Tables vii Acknowledgements viii Abstract viiii Introduction 1 Literature Review 2 Study Area 3 Methodology 4 Discussion and Conclusions 6 Figures and Illustrations Figure 1. Roser-Renouf, C., Maibach, E., Leiserowitz, A., & Rosenthal, S. (2016). Global Warming’s Six Americas and the Election, 2016. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. This figure is a graphic representation of how voters, categorized into the Six Americas, were likely to vote during the 2016 Presidential Election. Figure 2. Roser-Renouf, C., Maibach, E., Leiserowitz, A., & Rosenthal, S. (2016). Global Warming’s Six Americas and the Election, 2016. Yale University and George Mason University.New Haven, CT Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The representation of data collected over time by Roser-Renouf et al. 2016 in the specific graph is ideal for observing the percentage of people in each category as it changes over time. Figure 4. Question 3 from the survey answer key displayed here is an example of how the responses were assigned numeric values. 3. How worried are you about climate change? * Very worried (1) * Somewhat worried (.667) * Not very worried (.333) * Not at all worried (0) 1. What do you think? Is climate change happening? 2. Assuming climate change is occurring, do you think it is…? 3. How worried are you about climate change? 4. How much do you think climate change will harm you personally? 5. When do you think climate change will start to harm people in the United States? 6. How much do you think climate change will harm future generations? 7. How much had you thought about climate change before today? 8. How important is the issue of climate change to you personally? 9. How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “I could easily change my mind about climate change” 10. How many of your friends and relatives share you views on climate change? 11. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view? 12. Do you think citizens themselves should be doing more or less to address climate change? 13. Over the past 12 months, how many times have you actively avoided buying goods from companies that are opposing steps to reduce climate change? 14. Do you think climate change should be a low, medium, high, or very high priority for the President and Congress? 15. People disagree regarding whether the United States should reduce greenhouse gas emissions on its own, or make reductions only if other countries do too. Which of the following statements come closest to your own point of view? Figure 5. This chart displays the 15 questions about climate change attitudes used in my study. These survey questions were adapted from the Six Americas study conducted at Yale. Leiserowitz, A., A. Maibach, and E. Roser-Renouf, C. 2012. Global Warming’s Six Americas Screener Manual. Tables and Charts Question # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Downtown DeLand 0.841 0.790 0.573 0.507 0.652 0.6475 0.661 0.587 32.9 60.0 0.593 0.745 0.190 0.603 0.788 Stetson University 0.85 0.840 0.656 0.622 0.676 0.790 0.616 0.577 30.9 58.8 0.593 0.778 0.260 0.597 0.845 Table 1. This table displays the average responses to climate questions for Downtown DeLand and Stetson University. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for their continuous support, advice, and patience: Dr. Jason Evans Dr. Rachel Core Dr. Wendy Anderson Sompi Harmetz Emily Niederman Matthew D’Onofrio Environmental Science and Studies Class of 2017 Abstract I conducted a survey about climate change in order to compare attitudes of people found in two different locations, a university campus and a historic downtown district. I conducted this survey outside not because I thought it would be hot and that would make participants think about weather patterns but because that was the time of day in which I was able to fit the surveying into my schedule and it happened to be a busier time of day. Demographic questions were included at the end of the climate change portion of the survey because I wanted to see if there were any connections between demographics and climate change attitudes. I expected to see a relationship between political preferences and negative views about climate change, (Dunlap 2010). I hypothesized that I would receive more dismissive responses from those survey Downtown and that Stetson would respond with more concern because of their focus on environmentalism inside and outside the classrooms. Introduction Public misinformation concerning environmental terms is having a negative impact on our fight against global disasters linked to climate change. “Climate change in IPCC usage refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g. using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.” (IPCC2007). In Volusia County, where majority of permanent residents are, as of August 2016, registered Democrats I believe most still cling to conservative ideals (Florida Department of State 2016). I will personally conduct a detailed survey asking locals about their opinions and attitudes about climate change. The majority of Downtown Deland participants are expected to answer stating that they do not believe in climate change and therefore are not concerned with consequences. The second location in which I will be conducting this survey is Stetson University where I expect I will collect data supporting the notion that younger people are more concerned with environmental protection because of their connectedness with the world around them not necessarily with the natural world but with the media and each other, "Not surprisingly, younger Americans tend to rely heavily on the Internet for information about science and technology, while older generations still look to traditional media sources like television or newspapers" (Jones 2006). I will compare the answers of the participants to each other and organize them into groups based on age, political alignment, level of education, socioeconomic class, and biological sex. Incorporating as much categorical data as possible is crucial to my data collection because each category is part of someone's belief system regardless of whether or not they acknowledge it as such (Bradley 2007). After surveying 100 participants from each location I will conclude the survey and begin data analysis. Literature Review My anonymous survey will include elements from a study conducted by Leiserowitz et al. 2012 where six different kinds of “Americas” we established. The Six Americas refers to the six different audiences of people and how they respond to environmental issues; according to this study the audiences include: the Alarmed, the Concerned, the Cautious, the Disengaged, the Doubtful, and the Dismissive (Leiserowitz et al. 2012). The 2016 Presidential Election was an election that offered two candidates with completely polarized ideals. According to Roser-Renouf et al. 2016 “Majorities of the Cautious, Disengaged and Doubtful say it would make no difference to their vote or they’re not sure whether it would make a difference,” please refer to figure 1 in the appendix. Since the inception of the Six Americas Study the Cautious, Disengaged, and Doubtful groups have been, consistently the largest as can be seen in figure 2. This data collected is what lead me to predict that the surveys collected from Downtown DeLand will reflect more Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive views than those collected at Stetson University. According to Jesse M. Shapiro in her accepted manuscript on special interests in the media regarding climate change, “Skeptical perspectives on climate change have been prominent in the US news media. As recently as the early 2000s the majority of articles in national newspapers and segments in nightly news broadcasts about climate change were “balanced” in the sense of giving “roughly equal attention” to both sides” (2016). In Shapiro’s highlights she mentions the unwillingness to except truth despite scientific evidence “even when experts are in consensus” (2016). DeLand being located in Florida may skew my data due to tropical weather patterns. I expect that the appearance of Hurricane Matthew may have left an impression on many DeLand residents. The damage was not as extensive as predicted, which may have swayed the beliefs of some locals who thought the hurricane would have been more destructive due to climate change events. On the other hand, there may be some locals who believe that Hurricane Matthew was brought back to Florida’s coast as a result of climate change and that DeLand was lucky to have withstood the storm as well as it did. Current and future weather events are likely to impact my survey. People who personally experience hurricanes are more likely to vote for a politician with a strong environmental platform (Rudman, McLean, &Bunzl, 2013), and homeowners who experience flooding events first hand are more likely to believe in climate change events(Spence et al., 2011). Moreover, personal experience dealing with extreme climate events change someone’s perspective making them more likely to support the evidence for climate change (Reser, Bradley, Glendon, Ellul, & Callaghan, 2012) (McDonald et al. 2015). Study Area I chose Downtown DeLand and Stetson University because they are both places where people can enjoy spending free time outside. It is free to walk around Downtown and around Stetson which means I won’t be targeting people who can afford to participate is specific activities. But Downtown DeLand and Stetson University are very different places that attract different kinds of people. Downtown DeLand is a place where people go to shop, eat, and meet up with friends. Stetson is a place of learning where majority younger people meet up to study, listen to music, or set up tables for their clubs and organizations. I wanted to see if people who spend free time in one location versus the other had differing opinions about climate change. Methods A pre-survey session took place on February 26th after the IRB approved my project. The pre-survey session included 25 participants from Downtown DeLand and 25 from Stetson University. Corrections were made to survey, for example formatting adjustments and changing font sizes, rewording questions without changing the questions. Once minor adjustments were made my survey was ready and 200 copies were printed for the participants and one copy for me to make an answer key. The survey took place on February 28th and March 4nd, 2017. I collected surveys from 100 participants from each location, for a total number of 200 people surveyed. Instead of interviewing orally I handed out pens of all the same color ink and clipboards to my participants allowing for a more private completion of the survey. I conducted my survey entirely outside, on foot with all identical clipboards and identical pens which were used to fill out the survey. Upon calling the media specialist at city hall it was suggested that I conduct my survey while continuously walking around so that I do not get any reports to the authorities for any reason. The survey I used was one sided and 14 size font making the material easily read. The question and answer options in the survey were based off of The Six Americas study, that has been shown to be an effective survey, and I had a way to evaluate my participant’s answers. (Leiserowitz et al. 2012). Considering the diversity of Deland, containing a liberal arts university as well as retirees and families of varying incomes I included in the survey check boxes to determine where participants receive their news as studies have shown that media plays a huge role in the climate change debate (Sampei 2009). It was important to see if there are any statistically significant relationships between age, location surveyed, and media with participants’ climate change beliefs. Along with the source of news I also included how often participants seek news via their media format of choice. I asked about media and news after the climate change portion along with demographic questions. The second location in which I conducted my survey was Stetson University where I repeated the same processes with identical clipboards and identical pens. Once the participant was finished I had them place their survey in a confidential survey box. I did not sort through data until the survey session was completed. Once all the data was collected I input my raw data into an Excel spreadsheet. I ran t-tests to compare different answers to see if there were any statistically significant relationships between locations and the answers chosen. A Likert scale assigned numerical values to answer options similarly to the one provided by The Six Americas Screening Guide (Leiserowitz et al. 2012). In order to quickly and efficiently assign values to answers options I created a key with the values adjacent to the answer options. I used 1 to signify the option chosen was the most environmentally concerned. Someone who was extremely concerned about climate change and is optimistic we can make headway to resolve climate change issues would have majority answers of 1. Those who answered dismissively would have many 0s as their answer score. With the most positive option receiving a score of 1 and the most negative option receiving a 0 the answer options in between were divided up equally and assigned a value with decimals rounded to 3 significant figures. For example, question number 3 has four answer choices, the most environmentally concerned was valued at 1, and the least at 0 (figure4). I divided the three options that do not receive the 0 value by three and assign values. In this example values would include: 1, .667, .333, 0 (figure 4). All data was anonymous therefore once the survey was completed I did not contact the participants with results. Discussion and Conclusions Upon collecting my data, I found that many participants were unexpectedly undecided about whether or not they believed in climate change, 13% of the participants surveyed in Downtown DeLand did not know if they believed climate change was occurring. On average participants surveyed at Stetson University were more concerned about the ramifications of climate change than those surveyed Downtown. However, it is interesting that there were more participants who were very alarmed about climate change impacts and were worried about harm being done to our country. At the Stetson location, on average, there were more participants whose opinions fell into the middle of the spectrum, in which they deemed the harm being done as “somewhat important” (Table 1). 23% of those surveyed Downtown believe that climate change is mostly a naturally occurring event and 19% at Stetson. Stetson participants largely included enrolled students, however, anyone who was on campus during the survey period was surveyed regardless and therefore there are some non-students among the Stetson participants. I found that those surveyed at Stetson, despite their young average ages of 18-22, were more likely to be concerned about the well-being of future generations with regards to climate change as well as the possible harm it can cause. 59% of Stetson participants believed that climate change would harm future generations “A great deal”. I expected to find more climate change denial among the Downtown DeLand participants. Even if there are still 13% who don’t know if they believe or not the decision can still be made later to believe in climate change. Questions 9 and 10, (Figure 5), of this survey were assigned numeric value differently than the rest of the survey, if were to recreate this survey in the future I would either find a way to reword these questions in order to assign appropriate values to the responses, or I would ask different questions instead. I do think it would be best to reword these questions as they are important questions that help researchers understand the social reach of climate change discussion. Question 10 of this study asks the participants how many of their friends and relatives shared their views on climate change and Downtown participants answered as I expected, majority responded that they “did not know” (Figure 5). This data implies that climate change discussions are not occurring frequently enough in casual daily life settings, participants could not answer that even “some” of their friends or relatives shared their views. I encountered more Republican participants Downtown than I did at Stetson but only 6 more. There were more participants without a political party than I anticipated, most of which were under the age of 53. Data collection was much easier than anticipated, most people were happy to take my survey. Initially One-Way ANOVAs were run, however, when my advisor and I inspected the results it was decided a one tailed t-test would be a better way to test for comparisons between two categories. Running t-tests provided much clearer answers as to which categories I was comparing had statistically significant relationships to each other at 95% confidence. Political affiliation and location in which participants were surveyed show a relationship, especially when analyzing the Tukey-Kramer test that showed Democrats and Independents more concerned about climate change and Republicans care the absolute least. Unlike my hypothesis predicted there was no relationship between age and climate change beliefs. My data and findings did show that on average more people over the age of 55 use newspapers as their main media source supporting Jones 2006. A one-way t-Test assuming unequal variances comparing Downtown DeLand to Stetson University participant answers showed statistical significance for 3 out of 15 questions. The 3 questions shown to be most significant were questions 3, 4, and 6 seen highlighted in yellow in figure 5. These relationships were strong, between location in which the participant was survey and their responses: uestion 3 had a p-value= 0.0374, question 4 had a p-value= 0.0135, and question 6 had a p-value= 0.0015. The analysis of these 3 questions supports my overall hypothesis: Stetson participants were more concerned about climate change (Figure 5). This particular study is a relevant contribution to the environmental studies field because it helps educators and those who are trying to understand why climate change beliefs vary so much from person to person. 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