Global Warming’s “Six Americas Short Survey”: Audience Segmentation of Climate Change Views Using a Four Question Instrument

Abstract

Audience segmentation has long been used in marketing, public health, and communication, and is now becoming an important tool in the environmental domain as well. Global Warming's Six Americas is a well-established segmentation of Americans based on their climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The original Six Americas model requires a 36 question-screener and although there is increasing interest in using these segments to guide education and outreach efforts, the number of survey items required is a deterrent. Using 14 national samples and machine learning algorithms, we identify a subset of four questions from the original 36, the Six Americas Short SurveY (SASSY), that accurately segment survey respondents into the Six Americas categories. The four items cover respondents' global warming risk perceptions, worry, expected harm to future generations, and personal importance of the issue. The true positive accuracy rate for the model ranges between 70% and 87% across the six segments on a 20% hold-out set. Similar results were achieved with four out-of-sample validation data sets. In addition, the screener showed testretest reliability on an independent, two-wave sample. To facilitate further research and outreach, we provide a web-based application of the new short-screener.

Science communication scholars use more and more segmentation analyses: Can we take them to the next level?

“…If authors used methods that facilitated transparent reporting and continued efforts, future research could take proposed segment solutions and apply them to their data for, say, another country or another time period. In climate change communication, the "Six Americas" solution (Maibach, Leiserowitz, Roser-Renouf, & Mertz, 2011) highlights this potential; researchers have applied it to other countries and periods (M. Morrison et al, 2013;Mark Morrison et al, 2018) and developed shorter scales (Chryst et al, 2018;Swim & Geiger, 2015). The continued efforts we see in science communication are be authors taking qualitative looks at specific clusters discovered in their previous studies (Kawamoto et al, 2013).…”

Audience Segments in Environmental and Science Communication: Recent Findings and Future Perspectives

“…In contrast, the paper by Chryst, Marlon, van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Maibach, and Roser-Renouf (2018) deals with the issue of climate change. Based on the Global Warming's Six Americas segmentation analyseswhich originally require a set of 36 survey itemsthe authors identify a subset of four questions which can be used to segment respondents into the "Six America's" categories.…”

Climate change and marketing: Stranded research or a sustainable development?

“…Marketing communication lies at the heart of communicating information regarding the nature of the climate change problem as well as being a means to encourage appropriate business and consumer behaviours (Johnson, ; O'Neill & Smith, ; Rekettye, ). In order to be able to achieve this, there is emphasis on gaining an improved understanding of the climate change views of the public (Chryst et al, ; Morrison, Duncan, Sherley, & Parton, ; Peattie et al, ) as well as key stakeholders (Bocken & Allwood, ; Poudyal, Siry, & Bowker, ). Audience segmentation has also been identified as crucial to improved climate change communication (Hine et al, , ; Hine et al, ; Morrison, Duncan, & Parton, ; Sherley, Morrison, Duncan, & Parton, ), as well as improvements in messaging (Akil, Robert‐Demontrond, & Bouillé, ; Anghelcev, Chung, Sar, & Duff, ; Noble, Pomering, & Johnson, ).…”