Environmental values in climate change digital communication: The case of Belgian and French Youth for Climate movements on Instagram and TikTok

Samofalova, Yuliya;Catellani, Andrea;Cougnon, Louise-Amélie
(2023) Living with Climate Change. International, cross-disciplinary conference. — Location: Bergen, Norway (8.May.2023)

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Given that novel approaches to climate change communication, as the value-based approach, remain widely understudied (Fage-Butler, 2022), we propose to link together environmental psychology findings and a communication research methodology. Specifically, we investigate how environmental values can play an important role in defining obstacles to pro-environmental behavior. The research is based on a corpus of 514 images and 165 videos from Instagram and TikTok posts published by the Belgian and French Youth for Climate movements since 2021. By conducting a multimodal content analysis, the research focuses on different elements in Youth for Climate’s messages: (1) the actions proposed to mitigate the effects of climate change, (2) the actors given responsibility for climate change and for climate action, (3) the listed barriers and obstacles to climate change engagement, and (4) the values emerging in the posts linked to those barriers and obstacles. While the first three categories are inductively extracted from the social media posts, the categories of values are adapted from environmental psychology and include biospheric, altruistic, egoistic, and hedonic values (Bouman et al., 2018). As argued by previous research in environmental psychology from survey data, “widespread climate action seems more likely when biospheric values are endorsed strongly throughout society” (Bouman et al., 2021: 103). In this work, we test this hypothesis on social media data and suggest that the analysis of the relationships between actions, actors, and values will provide a deeper understanding of barriers to climate action presented in social media posts. More precisely, we propose a typology of barriers to climate change mitigation in relation to environmental values that appear in the social media posts. The analysis grid can be further replicated by other research on environmental communication.
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Samofalova, Y., Catellani, A., & Cougnon, L.-A. (2023). Environmental values in climate change digital communication: The case of Belgian and French Youth for Climate movements on Instagram and TikTok. Living with Climate Change. International, cross-disciplinary conference., Bergen, Norway. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/105892