Environmental Risk Information Seeking: The Differential Roles of Anxiety and Hopelessness

ABSTRACT

Americans’ concern about water quality has increased over the years. Indeed, several water issues made national news coverage during the past few years, such as lead in Flint, Michigan, algae blooms in Florida, and water quality at the Rio Olympics. In this study, we test two alternate paths of engagement relative to how people respond to water problems. First, we examine anxiety as a key variable that triggers active information seeking behaviors. Second, we look at hopelessness as an intervening variable that could explain why some people become disengaged with issues. Additionally, we test whether response efficacy moderates the relationships between perceiving a problem with water and these emotions. Using survey data collected during the fall of 2015, we examine the role of different emotions in increasing and decreasing active information seeking behaviors.

KEYWORDS:

• Information seeking
• emotions
• quantitative
• survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Meredith Y. Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2225-0719

Notes

1 This list was created based on our assessment of what water quality issues most bodies of water face across the US. Many of these are relatively common issues such as water shortage and droughts. Similarly, algae blooms along with phosphorus have become more common as algae blooms and dead zones have become more prominent. Other issues, which are less widely known, have also been shown to be problematic for water quality across the US. For example, the EPA notes that mine tailings and PCBs create problems relative to water pollution in the US (Bench, 2003).

2 We also analyzed these data in Mplus utilizing the MLR estimator. Applying this estimation strategy accounts for potential clustering effects that could be attributed to participants being nested within the various watersheds by utilizing robust Huber-White standard errors. The results yielded the same set of findings as those reported using the PROCESS macro. In essence, these results hold up even after accounting for regional differences for our key endogenous variables.