Barriers and methodology in transitioning to sustainability: Analysing web news comments concerning animal-based diets

Abstract

Global environmental goals require immediate action to combat climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, despite growing public awareness, policies adopted, and research undertaken, societies are far from transitioning to sustainability. The barriers to a transition are complex and diverse. Previous research identified motivational factors that impede societal change: knowledge, values, self-interest, structural problems, concepts of normality and emotions. The aim of this paper is to investigate if these factors are reflected in comments about meat and animal-derived product consumption. In order to overcome a number of shortcomings of frequently used social research methods (e.g. surveys, focus groups, interviews), we adopt a qualitative content analysis of web news comments. We choose this approach because content analysis is an unobtrusive research method which provides undistorted and hence valuable insights into the attitudes/motivations/emotions etc. of the commentators. The results show that self-interest, concepts of normality as well as emotions such as fear, frustration, anger and lacking trust seem to make a transition to sustainability very difficult. Values appear to both impede and enable sustainable behaviour while knowledge only plays a minor role. These factors in combination with the interdependence of all actors of society might explain why achieving global environmental goals is so very challenging.