by Grace Boyd, Kiaora Motson, and Hannah Schandelmeier-Lynch.
Introduction
Climate change continues to be a pressing issue and hot topic, present on the minds of many Americans and individuals across the globe. To uncover the range and source of different opinions on climate change in Portland, our group, Grace Boyd, Kiaora Motson, and Hannah Schandelmeier-Lynch, set out to survey Portlanders in the hopes of understanding why such a range of opinions exists and what this conveys about the political attitudes in the area.
To answer why there is such a range of opinions and where this difference comes from, we compared the responses of individuals by narrowing down our sample into distinct demographic categories. Though our sample is small and therefore limited both in number and geographical range, we discovered some unanticipated information about Portland and climate change.
Procedure
Our study focused on the question: How important of an issue is Climate Change when compared to other issues to Portlanders? Equipped with a short survey, maps of Portland, and a letter explaining the purpose of our research, we traveled to a Beaverton Fred Meyer’s to collect data for a “PDX periphery” sample. With the aforementioned question serving as the main focus of our survey, people answered by rating their response on a scale from 1-10, 1 meaning climate change is not a considerable issue when compared to others and 10 meaning climate change is the most important current issue. In addition, we gave people the opportunity to voice any other thoughts they had on climate change.
Divided into small groups, students traveled to either periphery or downtown Portland areas to collect data. Each student was required to survey at least one person among their groups. Together, with all the student survey results amassed, we’ve created a small representation on Portlanders’ thoughts on climate change gravity based on gender, race/ethnicity, age, and proximity to metropolitan center.
Comparison of Portland and National Data
Compared to cross national surveys, the aggregate consensus of portlanders seems to mirror the national numbers; according to the Pew Research Center, when asked “In your view, is global climate change a very serious problem, somewhat serious, not too serious, or not a problem?” Forty-five percent of Americans said they considered climate change to be a “very serious” problem. Twenty-nine percent of them considered it to be at least a ‘somewhat serious’ problem. Together, seventy-four percent of Americans believe climate change is a serious enough of a problem to keep on their radar of significant issues. Similar to our results, seventy-six percent of Portlanders scored between 7-10 indicating that they considered climate change action to be a high priority issue.
Comparison to Global PEW Poll
In a recent PEW poll conducted on January 9th, 2017, American citizens were questioned about how important they thought it was for the new president to take action against global climate change. In responding to the statement, “action against global climate change is…” they were given five options to choose from. They were as follows, “a top priority,” “important but a lower priority,” “not important,” “should not be done,” “and I don’t know.” The national results were much different than those found in our Portland area survey, but very similar to previous U.S. climate surveys. Thirty-eight percent of participants view global climate action as a top priority. Thirty-four percent view global climate action as important but lesser so than other current issues. Eighteen percent of respondents view global climate action as unimportant, seven percent think nothing should be done, and three percent did not know or refused to respond. In our Portland climate change public opinion survey 61.4 percent of respondents rated climate change as an 8 or above on the scale of importance. 21.3 percent of respondents rated the issue as a 6 or 7, leaving a remainder of 12.8 percent of respondents who rated the importance of climate change as a 5 or below.
Analysis of Variation in Response Across Demographic Difference
Many of our respondent variables showed very little difference in rating the importance of climate change. The average rating based on gender was 7.6 for females, 7.6 for males, and 6 for other. The average rating based on age group was 7.9 for respondents under 30, 7.7 for respondents between 30 and 60 years old, and 8.2 for respondents over the age of 60.
From our sample, the greatest response variation was found among different races/ethnicities. Looking at the average score from each race, Hispanics had the highest score at 8.6. While this graph does not reveal the reasons for differing opinions in terms of race, it is worth noting that the race averages revealed the most variation compared to other factors like gender and age. Additionally, because the sample is too small, and nonrandomized, any inferences made on the basis of race and what influences it has on shaping people’s climate change beliefs would be premature.
Another point to take into consideration is whether the surveys were taken in the PDX periphery or downtown PDX. It’s important to note that more surveys were conducted downtown than in the periphery, and that location where the survey was taken is not reflective of residence. However, one particularly interesting note reveals itself in Figure 3. A larger percent of individuals downtown – thirty percent – gave 10 as an answer, compared to the seventeen percent of individuals from PDX periphery. Further, twenty-three percent of periphery individuals gave an answer of 5 or below, compared to the fifteen percent of surveys taken downtown. This could suggest that proximity to a metropolitan center is a contributing factor towards perception of climate change importance, though the results do not reveal specific reasons.
Conclusion
When examining the individual variables like gender, race, location, and age, it’s hard to make any concrete conclusions about why these factors shape people’s beliefs. When grouped together as a representation of Portland, broader influences like political ideology, environmental awareness, and other complex factors, are likely to have more weight.
Additionally, the fact that our public opinion survey was not randomized does reduce the accuracy of our results when comparing them to that of the national data. There are also various forms of bias which can cause credibility problems as well. However, there are many things we can conclude from our results. We were surprised to see how closely periphery and downtown people valued climate change as an important issue for the most part, as typically political ideology becomes less liberal as the distance from a metropolitan center grows.
Looking deeper, it was also interesting to see that people aged 60 or older had a higher average score of 8.6 than people under 30 who had an average score of 7.9. Although a small discrepancy, it reminds us that not all generalizations are applicable, in this case younger age doesn’t guarantee a stronger support of climate issues.
Overall, our results indicated that Portlanders’ acknowledgment of the seriousness of climate change are slightly higher than the national average. Clearly, it is a high priority issue for them. Considering the ideological bias toward liberalism in the area, most Portlanders are skewed to view climate change with more alarm and apprehension. If we were to repeat our survey, using a larger random sample, we would likely get similar results, if not results that lean even more towards higher concern.