The Five Canadas of Climate Change: Using audience segmentation to inform communication on climate policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how unique audience segments within the Canadian population think and act toward climate change, and explores whether and how the level of audience engagement moderates the effect of various messages on support for climate policy. Drawing on a random probability sample of Canadian residents (N = 1207) conducted in October 2017, we first identify and describe five distinct audiences that vary in their attitudes, perceptions and behaviours with respect to climate change: the Alarmed (25%), Concerned (45%), Disengaged (5%), Doubtful (17%) and Dismissive (8%). We then explore how each segment responds to different messages about carbon pricing in Canada. We find that messages alluding to earmarking (i.e., "Invest in solutions") or leveling the playing field for alternative energy sources (i.e., "Relative price") increase support for a higher carbon price among the population as a whole. However, these messages decreased support for carbon pricing among more engaged audiences (e.g., Alarmed) when a low carbon price was specified to the respondent. Meanwhile, the "Relative price" is the only message that increased policy support among less engaged audiences-the Concerned and the Doubtful. In addition to highlighting the importance of tailoring and targeting messages for differently engaged segments, these results suggest that communicating around the specific consequences of carbon taxes for the prices of some goods may be a fruitful way to enhance support for carbon taxes among relatively less engaged audiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".