Changing Climate Attitudes

Publicly available data from Dav Clark's PhD dissertation research. Please note the usage restrictions in the LICENSE file. Moreover, if you use this data, please cite the appropriate reference. If in doubt, use this:

Ranney, M. A. and Clark, D. (2016), Climate Change Conceptual Change: Scientific Information Can Transform Attitudes. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8: 49–75. doi: 10.1111/tops.12187

All CSV files are provided in UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. Currently, the most definitive description of all experimental procedures is available in Dav Clark's dissertation, available here.

College Student Data was collected via hand-entered paper forms, or Qualtrics. All Mechanical Turk data was collected via Qualtrics.

In brief, the following terms are used to describe each dataset:

• Where collected:
  • cco (Climate Change Online): Data collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • UCp Collected at University of California, Berkeley on paper
  • UCo Collected at University of California, Berkeley using an online survey (but still in a testing room)
  • UT Collected at University of Texas, Brownsville (on paper)
• Intervention:
  • mech: Data were collected before and after a presentation of the written description of the climate change mechanism.
  • mech+stats: Data were collected before and after an extended curriculum including surprising numerical statistics and the description of the mechanism.
  • core_intervention: Whatever was given to all participants (or alternatively, all columns represented with some NAs, e.g., for no-pretest).
  • delayed_test: delayed post-test data.
  • full_intervention: Sometimes the core was redundantly included along with delayed_test data.
• Desiderata:
  • notext: Columns containing free text responses are not included. Ask Dav for this info if needed.

The following are organized based on the Ranney & Clark (2016) TopiCS paper. Note that in some cases, exported data have been reverse coded. This is noted explicitly. If real knowledge scores have not been computed, python code is provided in codes.py that can perform this computation.

• Experiment 2 - initial experiments at UC Berkeley and UT Brownsville:
  • UCp_mech_core_intervention_notext.csv (85 students)
  • UT_mech_core_intervention_notext.csv (41 students)
• Experiment 3 - online replication / extension at UC Berkeley:
  • UCo_mech_core_intervention_notext.csv (79 students with valid posttest and followup data, _pre data avilable only for knwgbl)
  • UCo_mech_full_intervention_notext.csv (38 students, all _pre data available from pre-screening survey - if unmarked, data is "pre")
  • UCo_mech_prescreening.csv (324 students, source of _pre data above, question text is on second line)
• Experiment 4 - online replication / extension on MTurk:
  • gw2_1, evo2_5, and evo2_6 are reverse-coded
  • cco_mech_core_intervention_notext.csv (38 valid participants)
  • cco_mech_delayed_test_notext.csv (28 completed)
• Experiment 5 - Expanded high school curriculum:
  • HS_mech+stats_full_intervention.csv (63 students)

If you wish to share the dataset, please use the following code (you can copy-paste the raw HTML from the raw version of this README.md file):

Changing Climate Attitudes data by Dav Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/glass-bead-labs/changing-climate-attitudes. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://github.com/glass-bead-labs/changing-climate-attitudes/blob/master/LICENSE.