Global Warming’s “Six Americas Short Survey”: Audience Segmentation of Climate Change Views Using a Four Question Instrument

ABSTRACT

Audience segmentation has long been used in marketing, public health, and communication, and is now becoming an important tool in the environmental domain as well. Global Warming's Six Americas is a well-established segmentation of Americans based on their climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The original Six Americas model requires a 36 question-screener and although there is increasing interest in using these segments to guide education and outreach efforts, the number of survey items required is a deterrent. Using 14 national samples and machine learning algorithms, we identify a subset of four questions from the original 36, the Six Americas Short SurveY (SASSY), that accurately segment survey respondents into the Six Americas categories. The four items cover respondents' global warming risk perceptions, worry, expected harm to future generations, and personal importance of the issue. The true positive accuracy rate for the model ranges between and across the six segments on a 20 hold-out set. Similar results were achieved with four out-of-sample validation data sets. In addition, the screener showed test-retest reliability on an independent, two-wave sample. To facilitate further research and outreach, we provide a web-based application of the new short-screener.

KEYWORDS:

• Six Americas
• global warming
• segmentation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It should be noted that attitudes toward climate change in Western nations are structured differently than in non-Western nations.

2 We also tested a six-item screener, incorporating introductory items: “Do you believe that global warming is happening” and “assuming global warming is happening, do you believe it is human-caused?” The accuracy of this model is similar and the relevant statistics can be found in the Appendix Tables 11 through 13.

3 Phone surveys are less likely to elicit “Don't know” responses, which is an important identifier for the Disengaged segment.

4 An all-possible-subset regression using Dominance analysis (Budescu, 1993) yielded a similar 4-item ranking, but this approach suffers from some of the same shortcomings (Matsuki, Kuperman, & Van Dyke, 2016).