by: Max Lorenze & Anna Tobin
Procedure
This survey was done by two classes of approximately 50 students throughout the city of Portland and its’ periphery. We were assigned to leave the downtown area and go to the suburbs so as to get a wider range of data. Max and I traveled to the Sellwood area for our survey. We went to coffee shops where people were less likely to be in a rush and would be able to spend more time giving feedback if they so desired. We approached individuals and introduced ourselves as Lewis & Clark students that are conducting a survey and asked if they were willing to participate. If they agreed, we explained the topic of the survey and asked the question “If you compare climate change to other issues today, how important is it to you personally?” We would elaborate by asking comparative questions to other hot topics in the world so as to try and gauge the depth of their concern for the climate on a scale of 1 to 10. After that question was answered, we asked if they had any comments they would like to make on the topic. Once we recorded what they said, we would thank them for their time and insights and would step away. After we left we would record physical indicators about the person such as gender and age to the best of our ability. We repeated this procedure until we fulfilled our data requirement and submitted it to the class database to compare the results. Through all this data we made graphs and calculated the means.
Results
The graph above represents the total results of the study. As seen in the graph above, the majority of interviewees (130 out of 159) identified climate change as 6 and above for importance. Portland is often viewed as a very liberal city, therefore it may not be overly surprising to readers that its’ citizens appear to be more fearful of the effects of Climate Change. However, it would be valuable to analyze our data and to analyze different demographics’ responses, along with comparing these results to national and international data.
Gender Analysis
The difference of climate importance between men and women in this survey is relatively small, with only a difference of 2.5% in favor of men. This is contradictory to a recent survey done by Pew Research in 2015. In their survey, 83% of Women view climate change as a serious issue in the US as opposed to 66% of men, a margin of 17 percentage points. These results suggest that women have a higher concern for climate change, however our data from the Portland area suggests the opposite. After analyzing our data we found that men and women have statistically similar concern for climate change compared to other issues. Specifically men responded with a 7.95 out of 10, showing very high concern for the climate change. Women responded with a 7.89 out of 10, slightly lower than the men we surveyed, but it shows similar concern for climate change. The survey also had an option for other/ not sure, but so few surveys had that response, that the data was insignificant. Also, the margin of difference is very wide for the Pew Research study while our results from Portland is very narrow. In all reality it is very difficult to compare our survey with the Pew Research survey considering that the surveys asked different questions. Along with asking a different question our survey was more informal. Every other major country tested doesn’t have as wide a margin as the US does, with Canada following with a margin of 13 percentage points. One would expect to see the high nation-wide marginal difference reflected in our data along with the female dominated gender gap.
So why do we not see this? It may be due to many different factors. The recent political climate and women’s march may have caused women to value gender issues more than climate change. An issue like climate change comes in and out of public attention in waves. There is a theory in political science called Ideological Constraint. It suggests that the public has a hard time staying concentrated on one issue due to a bombardment of information on varying topics from news sources and politicians. The Pew Research Study could have occurred after an important moment in climate politics so the news would have been saturated with the topic. This would cause people to pay more attention to it and deem it as more valuable. Women’s rights has been such a hot topic lately that in comparison, climate would be seen as less severe. Like all surveys both the national and international climate surrounding social, political, and cultural change affects the survey.
Conclusion
The class results for this survey differed greatly from survey results in America done by Pew Research. The nation-wide results suggest that there is a large disparity between men and women. However, our results suggested there was only a minuscule difference. This is more likely a reflection on Portland itself than the general population of America. It was comforting to see the high rate of concern for the climate we hold. It can be disconcerting when watching the news, as it is often claimed that the general public does not care for climate issues. Reading through the different comments that interviewees made about the climate helped humanize an often overwhelming topic. These conversations made both of us want to have deeper discussions with each person we interviewed. We realized the limitation of a survey as well. Asking “If you compare climate change to other issues today, how important is it to you personally?”, seems incredibly limited when compared to the complexity of the issue and the changing interests of society. A survey like this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes addressing hot topics. We need to have greater communication from all sides when analyzing public opinion if we ever want to accurately tackle climate change.