Climate & Social Media

Project Summary

Our group collaborated with Dr. McKenna Parnes from UW Medicine Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences to build a project relating to her research, which explores the effects of social media on young people's climate-related mental health, knowledge, and behavior. The project aims to understand how engagement with climate-related content on social media affects young people's mental health/attitudes (eco-anxiety, depression, burnout, hope), knowledge (awareness of the natural environment), and behaviors (participation in climate action, support-seeking activities).

Exploring social media's effects on climate-related mental health, knowledge, and behavior is vital because it has significant implications for our collective response to the climate crisis. It is a crucial area of focus since social media has an immense power to influence our attitudes and behaviors, which is especially relevant considering the high percentage of the young population that uses social media. For many individuals, particularly the younger generation, social media is their primary platform for news and information. Thus, it is prominent in fostering awareness and engagement on important issues. How we as a society respond to climate change is critical to mitigating its impact, and given social media's power in shaping our attitudes and behaviors, we need to understand its current effects. 

This project aims to explore the current state of climate-related communication on social media and evaluate how its viewers receive it. For example, are climate-related posts generally making people care more about the environment? Are they inducing a detrimental amount of fear or anxiety? What types of posts have been effective in engaging users and leading them to action? How does it affect the individual's mental health, and how does that state of mental health play into their overall climate-related behavior? Notably, the scope of this research project will leave many questions unanswered, especially considering that this is a relatively new field of study. However, it will undoubtedly provide some preliminary understanding and beneficial insight into the most critical questions that should be explored further. Through further research of this type, the data can ultimately inform us on how to design effective climate-crisis communication media that helps make people care and engage in productive action.

We took a qualitative approach to this research study and conducted one-on-one interviews. Qualitative research allowed us to engage with complex questions and gain rich, nuanced data to capture the 'why' and 'how.' Additionally, this form of research allowed us to be adaptable in our interview sessions - we probed further. We asked follow-up questions when appropriate, often exploring unexpected but insightful areas of information. This qualitative approach was well-suited for exploring our participants' unique subjective experiences. 

We conducted 11 interviews with individuals aged 15-25 about climate change and social media. We designed our questions to assess interviewees' emotional and mental stances around the changing climate and social media platforms and their immediate reactions to specific climate-related social media posts we had them observe.

Project Members

Lucas Stoltman, Rileigh Thomspon, Alyssa Lara, Kate Johnson, & Brendan Amort