Communicating global warming: the framing effect of climate change in shaping attitudes and behaviors

Reinforced by the 5th International Panel of Climate Change report, tackle with climate change is one of the major and urgent challenges for modern and industrialized societies. In order to engage the public with climate change, persuasive communication and effective awareness raising activities are required. Climate communication represents an important field of study for social sciences. Particularly, the research has focused on the ways by which the media communicate, and consequently frame, climate change. Empirical evidences (among them: Nisbet, 2009) showed the adoption of eight recurrent frames: scientific certainty; scientific controversy; catastrophic and dramatic consequences; political issue and matter of struggle among groups; opportunity for social progress; problem for economic competitiveness; opportunity for economic competitiveness; moral and ethical issue. Drawing on the value-beliefs-norms model of environmental commitment (Stern, Dietz, Abel, Guagnano, & Kalof, 1999; Stern, Dietz, & Kalof, 1993), and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Ajzen & Madden, 1986), the research proposal aims to investigate how media frames on climate change may affect: environmental beliefs and institutional trust, attitudes, norms and intentions concerning ecological behaviors. On the basis of previous framing studies on climate change, a deductive content analysis on Italian TV news will be performed. Therefore, we’ll use a pretest-posttest experimental design in order to examine the effects of climate change framing on the abovementioned variables. From content analysis we’ll select eight representative video messages, one for each frame, which constitute the experimental conditions. To participants will be asked to complete a pre-test questionnaire, which consists of the following measures: Environmental Beliefs, using the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale (Dunlap, 2008). Institutional Trust, asking to participants to rate how much trust they have in political governments, scientists, environmental organizations and media. Attitudes, social and personal norms related to nine significant carbon-reduction behaviors (DEFRA, 2008). Pro-environmental behavioral habits and behavioral intentions related to the same behaviors. Socio-demographic data and political orientation. Some week later participants will be assigned randomly to view one of the eight video message conditions, and to a control group with no video message, asking them, after the video message, to complete the same questionnaire administered in the pre-test phase. Thus, it will be possible to run an analysis within and between subjects, in order to verify the presence of significant effects for each frame, and the existence of significant differences among the effects of climate frames on the dependent variables. References Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211. Ajzen, I., & Madden, T. J. (1986). Prediction of goal-directed behavior: Attitudes, intentions, and perceived behavioral control. Journal of experimental social psychology, 22(5), 453-474. DEFRA. (2008). A Framework For Pro-Environmental Behaviours. London: DEFRA. Dunlap, R. E. (2008). The new environmental paradigm scale: From marginality to worldwide use. Journal of Environmental Education, 40, 3-18. Nisbet, M. C. (2009). Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public engagement. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 51(2), 12-23. Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., Abel, T. D., Guagnano, G. A., & Kalof, L. (1999). A value-belief-norm theory of support for social movements: The case of environmentalism. Human ecology review, 6(2), 81. Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., & Kalof, L. (1993). Value orientations, gender, and environmental concern. Environment and behavior, 25(5), 322-348.