Global climate change Pictures

This research project builds upon a growing research effort to incorporate social and behavioral theory and analysis to create a clearer picture of the role of news media in shaping public awareness about global climate change and associated actions (or lack thereof). This research was motivated by a desire to better understand 1) the types of information that have been provided in news reports about climate change over the past several decades, and 2) how people are likely to interpret and react to and/or act upon the information contained in these news stories. A better understanding of the types of information that have been provided in news reports is being pursued through algorithmic text analysis and visualization of approximately 156, 000 news texts from print, broadcast, and digital media, and a human-coded content analysis of approximately 350 images randomly sampled from among the images that appeared with the newspaper and magazine stories.

This news representation project is part of a much larger project, both in Dr. Hespanha’s dissertation (Thematic and affective content in textual and visual communication about climate change: Historical overview of mass media sources and empirical investigation of emotional responses. Doctoral Dissertation, UCSB Department of Geography, 2011) and proposed ongoing work. To better understand how people interpret, react to, and act upon information about climate change that they acquire from news stories, preliminary studies have explored the ways in which climate change news may elicit emotional response and thereby encourage or discourage different ways of thinking about the issue or different decisions or actions in response to the information presented. Further study in this area will focus on empirical observation of self-reported emotional response to climate change news texts and images and will involve examination of relationships between the types of information presented and individual-level variables that influence interpretation, emotional response, and motivation to take action on the issue.

Fanny Agniel
UC Santa Barbara Department of Geography Major and Project Research Assistant

Sean Retzloff
Sandrine Tien
UC Santa Barbara Department of Communication Majors and Project Research Assistants

Project Code Book

This is the codebook for the image content analysis project. The first column contains the broad Category for each theme, the second column contains the Specific Theme, the third column contains a description of the Specific Theme, and the fourth column contains the sequential number for the code. Themes are specific themes and were coded based on examination of the images. Categories are more general themes, and each was derived from the specific themes listed in its Description column. Here they are used to group specific themes for greater conceptual ease in coding the images for specific themes. The codebook contains 118 specific Themes within 19 Categories. The final Categories, Themes, and specific wording is the result of multiple codings of the 350 images using 123 codes by three coders, involving over 175, 000 separate codings. All of the final 118 codes exhibited excellent agreements and reliabilities (available from the authors).

• Global climate change Controversy
• Global climate change Data
• Global climate change Topics
• Global climate change Images