Postdoc Sociology; Understanding climate change attitudes (3 years, 0.8 fte)

What does climate change mean to people? And how do these meanings shape their responses to policy and information campaigns?

Introduction

While a voluminous literature has mapped the social groups most and least concerned about climate change, a crucial lacuna remains: what does climate change actually mean to people? What do they believe is happening?

Scholarship has typically focused on explaining people’s level of concern and how strongly they believe in anthropogenic climate change—without acknowledging that the same answer given to survey questions means different things to different people. 

Moreover, extant research has focused on the factors that explain levels of concern among the public as a whole, ignoring that specific factors likely matter more for some groups than for others because the meanings they ascribe to climate change differ.