Investigating the Long-Term Impacts of Climate Change Communications on Individuals’ Attitudes and Behavior

By Rachel A. Howell. 2014

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To assess the effectiveness of climate change communications, it is important to examine their long-term impacts on individuals’ attitudes and behavior. This article offers an example study and a discussion of the challenges of conducting long-term investigations of behavioral change related to climate change communications (a vital and underresearched area). The research reported is a longitudinal panel study of the impacts on UK viewers of the climate change movie The Age of Stupid. The heightened levels of concern, motivation to act, and sense of agency about action that were initially generated by the movie did not measurably persist over the long term. The results also show that behavioral intentions do not necessarily translate into action. Data analysis raised issues concerning the reliability of participants’ causal attributions of their behavior. This and other methodological challenges are discussed, and some ways of avoiding or lessening problems are suggested.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aabdce364b22ed3c5494a0f8192fd5077af18c4

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In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Zakaria Babutsidze
2. J. Reser
3. Andreas Chai
4. Graham Bradley

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Zakaria Babutsidze
2. J. Reser
3. Andreas Chai
4. Graham Bradley

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Zakaria Babutsidze
2. J. Reser
3. Andreas Chai
4. Graham Bradley

Citations in the corpus

• Effects of Monetary Versus Environmental Information Framing: Implications for Long-Term Pro-Environmental Behavior and Intrinsic Motivation (2018, unknown): “Our findings for change in self-reported behavior are in line with a longitudinal study on climate change communication (Howell, 2014), which reported that the initial motivation to change one’s behavior after seeing the movie “The age of stupid” did not persist in the long run and that behavioral…”
• The role of climate change risk perception, response efficacy, and psychological adaptation in pro-environmental behavior: A two nation study (2020, result): “Although the behaviors were similar to those included in past studies (Howell, 2014; Spence et al., 2010; Whitmarsh, 2008), only four were common to both of the current surveys.”