Abstract
We investigate, using concepts from social psychological theories of the determinants of environmental behavior that might be affected by video media, the impact of viewing a short YouTube video about waste reduction while controlling for pre-existing environmental attitudes and beliefs, which is the greatest challenge in evaluating the impact of video media. The experimental design splits respondents approximately evenly between those who viewed the video and those who viewed just a text summarizing the points made in the video. Comparing results for the two subsamples is a way of identifying the impact of the video itself. For the sample as a whole, the video seemed to affect some beliefs and norms more than did the text alone. But for many measures of attitudes and intended behavior, there was no difference between the video and text samples, and sometimes neither sample had a significant change. We present suggestive evidence, though, that both video and text treatments have stronger effects on people who were not already strongly pro-environmental before the experimental treatment.
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Notes
This was to ensure sufficient observations to analyze possible racial differences, though it turned out that race was insignificant when used as a control variable.
Qualtrics allows only a limited number of factors to be used in customizing survey samples.
Respondents did not watch the video on youtube.com, but rather the video was embedded into Qualtrics.
These and later results show the impact on average values of the various measures used as dependent variables. Analysis of histograms shows that the main points are unchanged when we analyzed the entire distribution of the variables instead of just their mean values.
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Moskell, C., Turner, R.W. Can a YouTube video lead to changes in environmental beliefs, attitudes, norms, and intended behavior?. J Environ Stud Sci 12, 10–17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00719-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00719-9