Dissertation - Details
Dissertation of Gesa Lüdecke:
Media and climate-related responsible behavior
The Impact of Television Program on Individual Action for Climate Protection regarding Adolescents in Germany
Short description:
Climate change has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of our time. Besides political/governmental strategies to find an adaptive or mitigative way to tackle global warming (e.g. technological innovations), a fundamental transformation of the interrelation between society and environment is required. The gap between awareness, intended behaviour and action-related behaviour is still highly visible. In this context, incentives focussing on individual's level of action taking are discussed to be supportive for active sustainable behaviour. Next to educational institutions with small outreach, another dimension is required, that has a bigger scope in attaining the entire society. The media are discussed to fulfill this claim, focussing on television as the predominant medium. With emphasis on the increasing and extending media use in all societal spheres, television is also discussed as a socializing instance on individual and societal level, basically valid for adolescents. In this context it is interesting to pursue the question, to what extent television coverage on climate change can account for individual action-taking in climate protection.
Therefore, this project examines what influence media have on people’s behavior concerning climate issues. This is particularly important in terms of public broadcasting in Germany that has an educational mandate to inform and educate people about climate change and climate protection issues.
This research includes a content analysis of a significant selection of television broadcasting about climate change, as well as interviews with teenagers. This empirical approach seeks to, first, disclose television’s way of telling the public about climate change, and second, to understand teenagers’ appraisal of the relevance of television formats on climate change, considering their own predisposition to climate-related responsible behavior.
Funding: Leuphana scholarship of the University of Lüneburg (April 2008 – March 2011)
First Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Harald Heinrichs