Why we conducted the PIL Climate Change Study
Alison J. Head, Steven Geofrey, Barbara Fister, and Kirsten Hostetler
July 9, 2024
The Project Information Literacy (PIL) climate change study started with a research sabbatical — our first in 15 years. The PIL team met on Zoom to explore what we might focus on for our 14th report. We started with a discussion of doom scrolling. Who does this and why?
Our conversation soon shifted to hope and its counterpart, despair. In the wake of a traumatic pandemic and a contested presidential election, how were Americans feeling about the future? How do news and information contribute to making meaning of the world around us? What influence does it have on feeling hopeful, or not? How are our information worlds constructed today and how do they define who we are?
We were getting somewhere. Then the conversation turned to climate change. The climate crisis felt similar to the pandemic, but the world seemed less united in wanting it fixed, and fast. The topic of climate change was depressing, scary, and politically intractable. So how could anyone feel hopeful about the future?
To gain some background on climate change, Alison Head, the lead on our project, enrolled in a three-month Climate Stewards Program, a research-based certification program for volunteers at Pepperwood Preserve through the University of California at Davis.
These citizen scientists are motivated to turn despair over the climate crisis into hope and learn about how to talk about the science of climate change in their communities. Some had survived wildfires in Sonoma County that destroyed their homes and possessions. How were they using information to bolster their beliefs, action, and hopefulness?
As a team, we continued to meet and discuss readings by Hannah Ritchie, Katherine Hayhoe, Kari Norgaard, and others. A central question began to emerge: What role does information-seeking behavior play in forming individuals’ understanding of climate change?
While PIL’s previous studies have probed how college students navigate information for school, work, and daily life, the constraints posed by academic assignments were not especially informative about how people encounter and use information in their daily life, especially when trying to learn about an issue as challenging as climate change. Leveraging our combined domain expertise in information science, information literacy, media literacy, and data science, what could we learn about how people of all ages encounter and respond to climate change news and information at a time of exceptionally high political polarization?
As we framed a climate change study, we discovered new research opportunities for PIL. Notably, for the first time, we deployed our survey to the public along with a comparative sample of college students.
Building on long-term partnerships with academic librarians developed over the years, we worked closely with nine colleges and universities from across the country to collect survey data from their undergraduates about their climate change beliefs and information practices. It was clear, based on the overwhelming response from our frequent collaborators, this was an issue that resonated as a priority beyond our team. Many of the participating colleges and universities had launched initiatives, such as a larger private university developing a climate change research center and the two-year college creating a sustainability literacy curriculum. We had definitely struck a chord with our college partners.
Next, we turned to Qualtrics, the survey software company, to provide a segmented sample of respondents from across the U.S., ranging in age from 16 to 85, for us to administer our first survey. And we chose an affiliated sponsor that was not a university: the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the oldest and largest climate advocacy organizations in the U.S.
As we analyzed, dissected, wrangled, and grappled with a large and tremendously complex data set, key stories began to surface from what were sometimes confusing or even conflicting patterns of responses.
It quickly became evident that, apart from the analysis itself, the challenge was to communicate our findings in ways that were simple and clear, but rigorous. Our struggles with data analysis evolved into thorny challenges of design: How to present the major stories emerging from the data. How could we communicate our findings in words and visuals that our audience could quickly grasp? The final publication of this work was shaped by many months of iteration, revision, reversals, and team discussions.
Choosing a timely topic for research is important to PIL, but so is the makeup of the research team. For the climate study, we assembled a small team with exceptional and varied expertise plus creativity, dedication, and a sense of ownership for our study’s purpose.
In total, there were eight of us on the team — a principal investigator, three co-investigators, two PIL Fellows, a high school intern, and two editors, one who was a working journalist. Our ages ranged from 18 to 69, and despite these differences, we were bonded in our mutual drive to find answers to some of the thorniest — and scariest — questions facing our imperiled planet.
During several of our weekly conversations, we had to stay indoors to avoid smoke from the raging wildfires in Canada. And during the final weeks of writing this report, a team member in the Midwest had to take shelter from tornadoes, while another was battling a heat dome in New England, and still another was only miles from a wildfire that took five days to contain. The impact of climate change had landed on all of our own doorsteps while we were writing this report.
Looking back at PIL’s years as a research institute, the college studies we conducted for over a decade helped librarians and university faculty understand how students conducted research in a digital age, how they processed news, and what they thought about the algorithms that were shaping their information environment.
Now, during an era of fierce political division, it was the right time for PIL to reveal how Americans of all ages encounter and engage with news and information about the climate crisis so that we can play our part in working toward a sustainable, hopeful future.