Who participates in the climate change online discourse? A typology of Germans’ online engagement

Abstract

This paper argues the relevance of the internet for scientific communication. It is not only an immense source of information, it also empowers laypeople to interact by commenting, rating, and sharing online content. Previous studies have found that users' contributions to online content affect the reception processes. However, research on who actually uses these participatory possibilities is scarce. This paper characterizes engaged (and non-engaged) online users by analyzing online engagement (using search engines and different participatory forms) with a representative German online survey (n = 1,463). Different groups of climate change perceptions (such as uncertainty of scientific evidence), attitudes, knowledge, and online engagement are identified with hierarchical cluster analyses. Interest and knowledge are main drivers of online engagement, although a group of uninterested, unknowing and doubtful users participates in SNSs. The most active group, participating experts, knows most about scientific processes in climate sciences. No distinct group of skeptical participants was identified.

What do people know about climate change ― and how confident are they? On measurements and analyses of science related knowledge

“…Additionally, items were developed to cover the last dimension of scientific knowledge according to considerations by Kiel and Rost [2002]. The scale of procedural knowledge collects information about the recipients' understanding of how scientific findings are developed [Bauer, Allum and Miller, 2007;Miller, 1983;Nisbet et al, 2002;Taddicken and Reif, 2016] in climate research (see Table 7). …”

“…Attitudes are measured by three indices on the same five-point Likert scale (please see Taddicken and Reif [2016] for a list of items). Problem awareness, according to Taddicken [2013] and Taddicken and Neverla [2011], denotes the degree to which respondents rate climate change as problematic issue.…”

‘Fake News’ in Science Communication: Emotions and Strategies of Coping with Dissonance Online

“…As emotions are at the centre of the research, this study is mainly interested in affective attitude components. Therefore, we will analyse an individual's climate change problem awareness (reduced scale of Taddicken & Reif, 2016), first introduced by Taddicken (2013). For measuring the immediate state of dissonance, we conducted in t b positive and negative affects by means of the German version (Breyer & Bluemke, 2016) of the widely used Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scale (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).…”

Emociones y difusión de noticias sobre el cambio climático en redes sociales. Influencia de hábitos, actitudes previas y usos y gratificaciones en universitarios

“…De manera similar se ha señalado que el conocimiento previo sobre un tema ejerce un papel decisivo a la hora de leer información que los usuarios encuentran incidentalmente en redes sociales (Karnowski et al, 2017). Del mismo modo el grado de conocimiento previo sobre el tema es uno de los principales factores que provocan la discusión y comentario de noticias sobre cambio climático (Taddicken & Reif, 2016). Por ello se propone la hipótesis H2: "El conocimiento previo sobre el cambio climático moderará la influencia de las emociones sobre la intención de compartir una noticia en redes sociales sobre este asunto".…”