Hope in the Face of Climate Change: Associations With Environmental Engagement and Student Perceptions of Teachers’ Emotion Communication Style and Future Orientation

Abstract

Is hope concerning climate change related to environmental engagement, or is it rather associated with unrealistic optimism and inactivity? This study on Swedish high school students identified two kinds of hope: constructive hope and hope based on denial. Constructive hope was positively associated with engagement and a perception that teachers respect students’ negative emotions concerning societal issues and have a future-oriented, positive, and solution-oriented communication style. Students who felt hope based on denial instead were less inclined to behave pro-environmentally and perceived their teachers as not taking their emotions seriously and as communicating in a pessimistic way. Boys perceived their teachers as less accepting of negative emotions, which explained why they felt more hope based on denial than girls. Practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• action competence
• climate change education
• coping
• future orientation
• self-efficacy

Notes

¹The arithmetic mean of the items in the scales for every person was used to create aggregated measures.

²The positive and the negative items were mixed in the questionnaire.

³In the questionnaire the items were presented in the same order as in this article.

⁴PAF was used instead of PCA because PAF can be used as a form of confirmative factor analysis, confirming the two factor solution found in Ojala (2012a).

⁵Although it is often said that the lower limit for an acceptable Cronbach's alpha is.70, in explorative research over.60 is deemed to be acceptable (Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black, 1998, p. 118).