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ESPP Students Win Honorable Mention in AAAS Student Poster Competition

Contact: Jessica A. Knoblauch, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or knoblau7@msu.edu

April 4, 2007

Congratulations to ESPP doctoral students David Bidwell and his co-author Rachael Shwom who recently received an honorable mention in the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. Their poster, entitled “Deliberation Lite: How Does Feedback Influence Public Climate Change Policy Support?” was presented at the AAAS Annual Meeting held in February.

The poster is based on Bidwell's and Shwom's research through a National Science Foundation grant on public attitudes towards climate change mitigation policies. Tom Dietz, principal investigator on the NSF grant, and Amy Dan, a post-doc on the grant, were also co-authors on the project.

“Finding workable policies to reduce human-induced climate change will require broad public support,” said Bidwell. “For these kinds of large-scale policy issues, it is important to have reliable methods for gauging public preferences.”

One-time mail or phone surveys, or polls, have traditionally been used to assess levels of public support for these policies. The project researchers wanted to determine whether different types of polling methods, such as one-time polling (the traditional method) and deliberative polling, affect responses to survey questions.

Many scholars have recommended deliberation, a process where people share information and talk to each other about what should be done about a problem, as an alternative to polling. However, it is difficult and expensive to have face-to-face deliberation for regional and national issues. Deliberative polling is a way to integrate a measure of deliberation into traditional polling efforts.

“The thinking here is that people who answer surveys provide quick off-the-top-of-their-head answers. By providing information about what factors others consider, survey respondents may think through their policy support a bit more and their response may provide a more accurate reflection of their actual policy support,” said Bidwell.

To evaluate the different types of polling methods, the project researchers used data from a mail survey that asked respondents to indicate their level of preference for eight types of policies that could be implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They divided respondents into two groups with each group completing two surveys. For the first group, the researchers used a “deliberation-lite” process. Before taking the second survey, the first group received feedback on how their fellow group members responded to the first survey and what factors they considered when responding. The second group did not receive any feedback prior to completing the second survey.

The researchers found that minimal deliberation did result in statistically significant changes in policy preferences. Bidwell says that more research is needed to understand how the deliberation affected responses. “This line of research could help us design low-cost deliberative strategies for surveying the public,” said Bidwell.