Abstract
Segmentation of survey respondents is a common tool in environmental communication as it helps to understand opinions of people and to deliver targeted messages. Prior research has segmented people based on their opinions about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. This involved an evaluation of 16 statements, which means considerable survey time and cost, particularly if administered by a third party, as well as cognitive burden on respondents, increasing the chance of incomplete responses. In this study, we apply a machine learning algorithm to results from past surveys among citizens and scientists to identify a robust, minimal set of questions that accurately segments respondents regarding their opinion on growth versus the environment. In particular, we distinguish three groups, called Green growth, Agrowth and Degrowth. To this end, we identify five perceptions, namely regarding ‘environmental protection’, ‘public services’, ‘life satisfaction’, ‘stability’ and ‘development space’. Prediction accuracy ranges between 81% and 89% across surveys and opinion segments. We apply the proposed set of questions on growth-vs-environment to a new survey from 2020 to illustrate its use as an efficient instrument in future surveys.
Highlights
Segmentation of survey respondents, known as ‘audience seg mentation’, is a common tool in environmental communication (Metag and Schafer, 2018)
Given the differences in the audiences of our two surveys addressed in Section 2.1, we will apply the procedure described in Section 2.2 first on each of the two primary surveys sepa rately, and pool the two data samples together to find a parsimo nious instrument that can correctly classify the survey respondents for different audiences
This section consists of four subsections for each of the exercises, with the third providing the overall five-statement instrument and the fourth validating the instrument on a recent dataset
Summary
Segmentation of survey respondents, known as ‘audience seg mentation’, is a common tool in environmental communication (Metag and Schafer, 2018). The simplest, dichotomous classification used in many large-scale surveys (e.g. World Values Sur vey) is to group those who (do not) prefer environmental protection over economic growth, or who (do not) believe that economic growth is compatible with environmental protection (Drews et al, 2018). These classifications draw on single survey questions, which may fail to cap ture important dimensions of public opinion related to the growth debate. Recent research uses a wider set of survey questions, arguably arriving at more robust and nuanced results (e.g., Tomaselli et al, 2019)
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