Acceptance or Indifference? Unveiling College Education's Unexpected Role in Climate Responsibility Framing Restricted; Files Only
Ren, Taoshu (Spring 2024)
Abstract
Climate change leads to dire environmental impacts, adversely affecting human society. Adoption of pro-environment behaviors—recycling, reducing, reusing—by enough people could mitigate these effects. This study investigates how news media framing, particularly the attribution of responsibility, sways public attitudes and actions toward climate change. Previous research has focused on media framing types but less on their influence on individual attitudes and behaviors. Our study aims to fill this gap, offering policy insights and empirical evidence on survey response consistency.
By conducting two identical survey experiments involving more than 1000 samples each in China and the U.S.—the countries with the highest levels of pollution—we compared the effects of framing that attributes climate change responsibility to one’s own domestic government, to a foreign government, and to both domestic and foreign governments, by adopting and designing various measures of attitude and behaviors. Our research found that: 1) In both the US and China surveys, attributing the responsibility for climate change to a foreign government substantially negatively influences individual pro-environment attitudes and behaviors. 2) However, attributing the responsibility to the survey participants' own country, contrary to our expectations, demonstrated a similar pattern of negative influence on individual climate attitudes and behaviors in the US survey but demonstrated an expected pattern of positive influence on climate attitude and behaviors in the China survey. 3) Education, specifically whether participants have a college degree in the US survey and whether participants have an advanced degree above college in the China survey, exhibits a heterogeneous effect on the framing of domestic government responsibility. College-educated/Advanced Degree individuals experience the most significant negative influence on their hypothetical donation to climate actions when they receive framing that attributes responsibility for climate change to their domestic government. 4) While screeners increase the internal consistency of survey responses, they significantly reduce the sample size and its representativeness.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Literature Review 3
Framing 3
Framing effect 4
News Framing 5
Framing Climate Change 6
Attribution of Responsibility Frame 6
Theory & Hypotheses 7
Hypothesis 1 8
Hypothesis 2 9
Improving Accuracy of Survey 9
Hypothesis 3 10
Research Design 10
Measuring Treatment Effect (Framing Effect) 11
Surveying strategy 14
Survey Platforms 14
Survey Instruments 15
Frame Contextualization 16
Frame Design 17
Estimation Strategy 21
Results: US Survey Experiment 22
Hypothesis 1 Framing Effect 22
Hypothesis 1 Conclusion 26
Hypothesis 2: Heterogenous Effect 27
Hypothesis 2 Conclusion 31
Hypothesis 3: Screener 31
Hypothesis 3 Conclusion 33
Results: China Survey Experiment 33
Hypothesis 1 Framing Effect 33
Hypothesis 1 Conclusion 38
Heterogenous Effect Results 38
Hypothesis 2 Conclusion 39
Screener Results and Conclusion 39
Discussion 40
Theory 1: The higher education promotes egoism 41
Theory 2: The higher education promotes caution in perceiving information 42
Difference between the US and China Survey: 43
Improvements 43
Concluding Notes 44
Appendix 46
Appendix A: Survey Instruments 46
Appendix B: Tables and Figures 54
Reference 60
About this Honors Thesis
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