Strengthening public engagement on environmental hazards: insights from cross-disciplinary air pollution research

ABSTRACT

Studying air pollution provides an opportunity to explore public opinion about the environment from a health perspective, and examine how the often-siloed fields of health, environmental, and science communication might inform each other to generate a more holistic understanding of these issues. This raises an important question for social scientists: what is the best way to understand public perception of hazards that rest at the intersection of health, the environment, and science? In this study, we examine the extent to which risk perceptions and environmental values predict individual-level protective behaviours and civic action surrounding air pollution in Portland, Oregon. We find that risk perceptions significantly predict individual-level protective behaviour, civic action, and engagement preferences to varying degrees. We also find that the inclusion of environmental values offers additional explanatory power. Results demonstrate that combining approaches from health, environmental, and science communication offers a more holistic understanding of public perception of and engagement with environmental risks.

KEYWORDS:

• Air pollution
• risk perceptions
• science communication
• public health
• New Environmental Paradigm

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and our ethical obligations as researchers, we report that we received funding from the Portland State University Digital City Testbed Center, and that we collaborated with Portland General Electric and the City of Portland Smart City PDX programme to collect the data used within this study. All funds were directed exclusively to data collection, and the authors of this work did not financially benefit from this support in any way. While the results of this work may be used by these organisations to inform their public engagement strategies, these organisations did not hold any influence over the analysis of data or reporting of research results.

Notes

1 Data were collected from 4 March through 14 April 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning to spread in Oregon. During this time, Oregon Governor Brown issued Executive Orders restricting gatherings and requiring social distancing. Executive orders about mask wearing did not begin until data collection ended. However, during data collection, the WHO issued advice that the general public should not wear masks (30 March 2020). The advisories and changing recommendations may have influenced participant responses, even though the question was specifically asked in regards to air pollution. To check for such history effects, we examined whether participant responses about likelihood to engage in mask wearing changed over time during data collection. They did not, nor did they vary by political ideology. We also ran our analyses both including the mask item and excluding it. There was no difference in our results either way.

2 The results reported here did not control for race. However, in analyses that did control for race, there was no statistically significant association with any of the dependent variables. This is likely due to the homogenous sample.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Portland State Univeristy Digital City Testbed Center [grant number: N/A].