Explaining topic prevalence in answers to open-ended survey questions about climate change

Tvinnereim, Endre; Fløttum, Kjersti

doi:10.1038/nclimate2663

Cited by 113 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…By contrast, men are significantly more likely to bring up the frame containing causes-that is, emissions from cars and industry. While this finding is consistent with earlier research from Norway (Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015), it remains an open question whether the mechanism linking gender to emphasis on causes is the same. Specifically, the Chinese result may be due to a relatively higher level of environmental knowledge in China among men (Xiao and Hong 2010) whereas the Norwegian result is linked to higher levels of climate skepticism in male respondents.…”

Section: Demographic Drivers Of Topic Prevalencesupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Conversely, the Glacier melt and sea-level rise topic is brought up more by younger respondents and also by men. This result differs fundamentally from a similar study in Norway, where women and older respondents brought up weather and ice melt more in an open-ended question about climate change, while men and the younger mentioned the future and impacts more (Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015).…”

Section: Demographic Drivers Of Topic Prevalencecontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…Specifically, four make statements about future events (Bpeople will…^); another two contain rhetorical questions about what will happen in the future (4 and 7), and, finally, one mentions Bfuture generations^explicitly (6). It thus partly mirrors the Bfuture/impact^topic identified by Tvinnereim and Fløttum (2015), but with a stronger health element.…”

Section: Structural Topic Modeling Of Survey Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, this method permits analysis of response content alongside other variables such as gender, age, and experimental treatment variables (Roberts et al 2014b). Besides the analysis of open-ended survey questions on climate change (Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015), STM has so far been applied to the analysis of documents produced by organizations opposed to action on climate change (Farrell 2016), classification of Arab Muslim cleric writings, and reactions to the Edward Snowden case (Lucas et al 2015). Related topic modeling methods have been employed to classify think tank statements on climate science and policy (Boussalis and Coan 2016) as well as analyze trends in newspaper coverage of nuclear technology over time (Jacobi et al 2016),…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Standard, fixed-response questionnaires may thus not contrast the public's views on these challenges in an accurate way. To solve this problem of measuring complex attitudes and potentially amorphous perceptions, openended survey questions have been used to explore the public's views on climate change/global warming (Leiserowitz 2005;Lorenzoni et al 2006;Smith and Leiserowitz 2014;Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015;Shwom et al 2010;Whitmarsh 2008) and ocean acidification (Capstick et al 2016). However, these studies limit themselves to one issue at a time and are thus unable to speak to the relationship between two separate but linked issues such as air pollution and climate change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public perceptions of air pollution and climate change: different manifestations, similar causes, and concerns

2016

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Co-benefits are seen as a key factor for overcoming the problems of collective action and extended time horizons holding back mitigation of global warming. The mechanism behind this hypothesis is that public acceptance of mitigation policies constitutes a crucial limiting factor, necessitating ancillary gains such as clean air for mitigation policy to be politically robust. However, the public's preference for local pollution mitigation and concomitant failure to appreciate the benefits of global warming mitigation is assumed rather than demonstrated. In this paper, we show, first, that people distinguish between the physical manifestations of air pollution and global warming, and second, that they see both phenomena as arising from the same causes as well as having negative impacts on humans. Specifically, using a survey experimental design with open-ended questions in an urban Chinese setting, we demonstrate that citizens relate glacier melt and sea-level rise to global warming, while linking the local phenomenon of smog almost exclusively to air pollution. At the same time, respondents link impacts on humans and vehicle/industrial pollution topics with both air pollution and global warming. These findings are relevant to decision-makers as they suggest that the public values mitigation of global warming in its own right. Our novel method may shed new light on a range of issues relating to energy, the economy, and environmental issues.

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Section: Demographic Drivers Of Topic Prevalencesupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Demographic Drivers Of Topic Prevalencecontrasting

confidence: 55%

Section: Structural Topic Modeling Of Survey Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public perceptions of air pollution and climate change: different manifestations, similar causes, and concerns

2016

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Climate change lifestyle narratives among Norwegian citizens: A linguistic analysis of survey discourse

Gjerstad

Fløttum

2021

European Policy Analysis

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The present study proposes an analysis of climate change (CC) narratives in answers to an open‐ended survey question, where we ask what a climate‐friendly lifestyle may imply. The representative survey has been conducted online by the Norwegian Citizen Panel/DIGSSCORE, located at the University of Bergen. The survey provided 1,149 answers from respondents across Norway. The analysis combines a lexical and a text linguistic approach (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017), based on Adam's (2008) analysis of the narrative text sequence (initial situation–complication–(re)action–resolution–final situation), and inspired by the Narrative Policy Framework's (NPF) notions of plot and narrative characters (Jones et al., 2014). Our analysis identified four main topics: consumption, transportation, politics, and energy, while the cast of characters is dominated by the first‐person singular, frequently portrayed as hero, and the first‐person plural in a predominantly villainous role. The frequent use of negation and argumentative connectives reflects the contentious nature of the issue.

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Tracing Personality Structure in Narratives: A Computational Bottom–Up Approach to Unpack Writers, Characters, and Personality in Historical Context

et al. 2020

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We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom‐up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions using three person‐description dictionaries marker scales as reference points for interpretation. Factor structures did not show strong convergence with the contemporary Big Five model. Jane Austen described characters in terms of social and emotional richness with greater nuances but using a less extensive vocabulary. Charles Dickens, in contrast, used a rich and diverse personality vocabulary, but those descriptions centred around more restricted dimensions of power and dominance. Although we could identify conceptually similar factors across the two authors, analyses of the overlapping vocabulary between the two authors suggested only moderate convergence. We discuss the utility and potential of automated text analysis and the lexical hypothesis to (i) provide insights into implicit personality models in historical texts and (ii) bridge the divide between idiographic and nomothetic perspectives. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology

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Explaining topic prevalence in answers to open-ended survey questions about climate change

Cited by 113 publications

References 21 publications

Public perceptions of air pollution and climate change: different manifestations, similar causes, and concerns

Public perceptions of air pollution and climate change: different manifestations, similar causes, and concerns

Climate change lifestyle narratives among Norwegian citizens: A linguistic analysis of survey discourse

Tracing Personality Structure in Narratives: A Computational Bottom–Up Approach to Unpack Writers, Characters, and Personality in Historical Context

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