Saunders, Richard

Saunders, Richard
Start date:
September 2020
Research Topic:
Climate Change Attitudes and Actions in Developed Economies
Research pathway:
Research Supervisor:
Marco Pomati
Supervising school:
Ysgol y Gwyddorau Cymdeithasol,
Primary funding source:
ESRC Studentship

A cross-national analysis of climate change attitudes and actions in developed economies

Key Questions:

  • How do public concerns and actions taken over climate change vary across countries with significant environmental differences?
  • How do these concerns and actions vary according to gender, age, education and other socio-demographic variables within different countries?
  • Do people view climate change as a problem primarily from a position of material security or does concern for the environment stem from more post-materialist considerations?

I will conduct secondary data analysis, making use of cross-national surveys such as the World Values Survey (WVS), European Social Survey (ESS), and International Social Survey Programme(ISSP). The ESS and ISSP are on the list of ESRC data sets.

I will use multi-level modelling to discover statistical associations between attitudes to climate change and both individual level predictors (such as age, gender, education, political views, post-materialist values, etc.) as well as country-level ones (including GDP, Human Development Index (HDI), etc.). . (Davidov et al. 2014).