The Public, The Media, and the Knowledge Gap

Impact of Education, Age, Newspapers, and Television on Environmental Knowledge, Concerns, and Behaviors

“…Education appears to have good utility as a predictor of environmental knowledge and subsequent behavior, as suggested in earlier studies (Bailey 1971;Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien 1980;Young 1980). Age, however, unexpectedly did not correlate with any of the dependent variables (Honnold 1984).…”

“…On the other hand, Larson, Zimmerman and Scherer (1982), Ramsey and Rickson (1976), Stamm (1972), and Tichenor, Donohue, Olien, and Bowers (1971) have presented data either to demonstrate that there is no relationship or to support other causal sequences. Bailey (1971) interviewed two samples before and after Earth Day (Ns = 162 and 120, respectively) and found that teenagers knew the most about the environment both before and after the event, whereas people 56 years old or older knew the least. The inverse relationship between age and knowledge appears stable and has been the focus of other investigations (Honnold 1984;Van Liere and Dunlap 1980).…”

The Impact of Television News on Public Environmental Knowledge

“…Educational level was the demographic characteristic most closely associated with environmental knowledge and opinion. Focusing exclusively on newspapers as the medium for educating the public about the Great Lakes may then lead to an "information gap," with those who are more knowIedgeable becoming even more informed while less knowledgeable people remain relatively uninformed (Bailey 1971).…”

Information for environmental citizenship

“…Retrieval ability may be dependent upon socio-demographic variables such as educational attainment, income or social class. Bailey (1971) found an inverse relationship between information and age, and positive relationships between social class, education, political activism and levels of information. This is supported by Hawthorne (1997), who established that the ability to negotiate the 'green maze' depends in large part upon knowing where to go for information, having the confidence to ask for and the ability to understand that information, and being able to pay for it if necessary.…”