title: Assessing climate change beliefs: Response effects of question wording and response alternatives.
abstract: To date, there is no 'gold standard' on how to best measure public climate change beliefs. We report a study (N = 897) testing four measures of climate change causation beliefs, drawn from four sources: the CSIRO, Griffith University, the Gallup poll, and the Newspoll. We found that question wording influences the outcome of beliefs reported. Questions that did not allow respondents to choose the option of believing in an equal mix of natural and anthropogenic climate change obtained different results to those that included the option. Age and belief groups were found to be important predictors of how consistent people were in reporting their beliefs. Response consistency gave some support to past findings suggesting climate change beliefs reflect something deeper in the individual belief system. Each belief question was assessed against five criterion variables commonly used in climate change literature. Implications for future studies are discussed.
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Australia Murni.greenhill@csiro.au.
authors.forename: Murni
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Greenhill
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Australia.
authors.forename: Zoe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Leviston
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Australia.
authors.forename: Rosemary
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Leonard
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Australia.
authors.forename: Iain
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001290:Attitude; D001315:Australia; D057231:Climate Change; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011057:Politics; D011639:Public Opinion; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: climate change beliefs; climate change causation questions; question wording effects; response consistency