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

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 744–747 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Citizens’ opinions are crucial for action on climate change, but are, owing to the complexity of the issue, diverse and potentially unformed1. We contribute to the understanding of public views on climate change and to knowledge needed by decision-makers by using a new approach to analyse answers to the open survey question ‘what comes to mind when you hear the words ‘climate change’?’. We apply automated text analysis, specifically structural topic modelling2, which induces distinct topics based on the relative frequencies of the words used in 2,115 responses. From these data, originating from the new, nationally representative Norwegian Citizen Panel, four distinct topics emerge: Weather/Ice, Future/Impact, Money/Consumption and Attribution. We find that Norwegians emphasize societal aspects of climate change more than do respondents in previous US and UK studies3,4,5,6. Furthermore, variables that explain variation in closed questions, such as gender and education, yield different and surprising results when employed to explain variation in what respondents emphasize. Finally, the sharp distinction between scepticism and acceptance of conventional climate science, often seen in previous studies, blurs in many textual responses as scepticism frequently turns into ambivalence.

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Figure 1: Effects of climate concern and age on topic prevalence.
Figure 2: Effect of gender and education on topic prevalence.

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Acknowledgements

The Research Council of Norway provided financial support for part of the work under the Lingclim project (grant no. 220654). We are very grateful to B. M. Stewart for support on technical issues related to our structural topic models. We also thank participants at the Norwegian Citizen Panel conference, Bergen, 6–7 November 2014.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Uni Research Rokkan Centre, Nygårdsgaten 5 5015 Bergen, Norway,

    Endre Tvinnereim

  2. Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, PO Box 7805, 5020 Bergen, Norway

    Kjersti Fløttum

Authors
  1. Endre Tvinnereim
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  2. Kjersti Fløttum
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Contributions

E.T. conceived the study and performed the quantitative analysis. E.T. and K.F. performed the qualitative analysis and structured and wrote the text.

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Correspondence to Endre Tvinnereim.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Tvinnereim, E., Fløttum, K. Explaining topic prevalence in answers to open-ended survey questions about climate change. Nature Clim Change 5, 744–747 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2663

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