This experiment compares two versions of a single question on worry about climate change. Since the effects of climate change aggravate over time, it may mostly impact future generations. For this reason (elderly) people’s worries about climate change partly capture their valuation of the welfare of future generations. However, the climate change worry question in the Understanding Society questionnaire specifically refers to personal worries: “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry me.”
This experiment directly compares this version with and alternative that changes the last phrases from “worry me” to “worry about”.
The allocation to these two versions of this question was done at the household level, with equal proportions allocated to each group. The allocations were stratified by sample origin, wave 16 incentive treatment allocation, wave 16 mode allocation, and government office region. The controlling variable is ff_climatechangew16 in file p_hhsamp_ip:
1 = ‘Worry me’ version
2 = ‘Worry about’ version
The variables affected by this experiment are in file p_indresp_ip:
scenv_nowo, scenv_nowoexp
