Live Poster Session: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/94700443705
Isaac Doggett
Hi! My name is Isaac. I am from Burlington, Vermont. I like to run, hike, watch movies, and read. I am a sophomore at Wesleyan and a Psychology/Philosophy double major. I took QAC 201 to fulfill a Psychology major requirement. I have really enjoyed answering my research question with data analysis, and I will look to take future classes similar to this for the rest of my time at Wes.
Abstract: Past research suggests that people living in areas at high risk of climate change are more likely to be worried about climate change, but are not necessarily more knowledgeable about it. Research also has shown that people with liberal political beliefs are more likely to believe in and to be worried about climate change than those with conservative political beliefs. Data collected for the US Climate Vulnerability Index, voting data from Ballotopedia, and survey data collected by Climate Change in the American Mind were examined for this project. Using that data, the relationship between counties’ vulnerability to climate change and the proportion of people in each county who believed in and were worried about climate change was modeled, with the majority political party of each county accounted for. Person correlation tests and linear regression analyses alike found a small but significant negative linear relationship between climate vulnerability and the proportion of people who were both worried about and believed in climate change, regardless of whether political party was accounted for. These findings show that vulnerability to climate change is not a powerful explanatory factor for how many people in a county believe in and are worried about climate change (if anything the more at risk a county is the less people there believe in/are worried about climate change), this pattern holds in both majority democratic and majority republican counties although democratic counties have significantly more people who believe in climate change and who are worried about climate change.
QAC-Poster