Motivating Action through Fostering Climate Change Hope and Concern and Avoiding Despair among Adolescents

By K. Stevenson, Nils Peterson. 2015

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Efforts to build climate change concern seem warranted to overcome apathy and promote action. However, research suggests that these efforts can backfire by breeding despair, denial and inaction. This may be especially true among younger audiences, as despair is highest among those who view climate challenges as out of their control, and children generally have lower perceived and actual control than adults in political and personal arenas. Though many studies have documented feelings of despair and sadness among younger audiences, few have explored how climate change hope may counteract despair and encourage productive responses to climate change concern. This study examined how climate change hope, despair, and concern predict pro-environmental behavior with a quantitative survey of a random sample of middle school students in North Carolina, USA (n = 1486). We did not find an interaction between climate change hope and concern or despair, but instead found climate change hope and concern independently and positively related to behavior and despair negatively related to behavior. These results suggest that climate change concern among K-12 audiences may be an important antecedent to behavior which does not dampen the positive impacts of hope. Further, rather than mitigating the negative effects of climate change despair, hope may be an independent predecessor to behavior. Students at Title I (a measure of low socioeconomic status) schools were less likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, suggesting climate literacy efforts should target schools with lower levels of socioeconomic status specifically.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71bfd5a67481a78e7b354a31455c362554d39977

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. C. Baker
2. E. Bragg
3. S. Clayton

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. S. Clayton
2. C. Baker
3. E. Bragg
4. A. Cunsolo
5. Jacqueline Middleton
6. C. Ogunbode
7. M. Ojala
8. P. Pihkala

In Sociology and Political Science

1. S. Clayton
2. C. Baker
3. E. Bragg
4. Jacqueline Middleton
5. A. Cunsolo
6. C. Ogunbode
7. M. Ojala
8. P. Pihkala

Citations in the corpus

• Educating for resilience: parent and teacher perceptions of children’s emotional needs in response to climate change (2020, background): “Educational efforts ought to explore actions others are taking and give concrete examples of steps students can take to join the efforts—steps that are achievable and relevant to children’s lives with the examples reflecting the age of the students (Stevenson and Peterson 2015).”
• Anxiety, Worry, and Grief in a Time of Environmental and Climate Crisis: A Narrative Review (2021, background): “A more recent study with middle-school students in the United States also found a positive relation between concern about climate change and engagement, whereas the association between engagement and despair was the opposite (145).”