Much work has been done in communicating environmental messages about climate change to promote pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours, yet individual-level behavioural changes are not occurring rapidly enough to make meaningful reductions in environmental harm. Studies have shown that although information-based and scientific means of communicating about climate change are the most common strategies, they are largely ineffective in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. As an alternative to these fact-based narratives, stories are proposed as effective tools for environmental communication and promoting behavioural change. To determine the impact of the narrative structure of climate change communication on behaviour, this study examined how exposure to fact-based and story-based narrative structures of environmental messages differentially influence the extent of engagement in pro-environmental consumption behaviour. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was used as a framework to examine the attitudinal and behavioural responses to the story-based and fact-based communication conditions. Specifically, we examined the relationship between non-consumption attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, behavioural intentions, and non-consumption behaviour, and explored how narrative structure influences the TPB processes for non-consumption. Participants (n=291) were randomly assigned to read a story or factsheet about the environmental consequences of overconsumption of material goods, or a non-relevant text. Pre- and post-test measures of pro-environmental consumption behaviour were conducted 14 days apart. Post-test attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, and behavioural intentions towards practicing non-consumption were also measured. Results demonstrated that both story-based and fact-based narratives were effective tools for promoting pro-environmental consumption behaviour, providing some support for the information deficit theory. Four domains of pro-environmental consumption behaviour were determined as non-consumption, reuse, activism, and green shopping behaviour. The story-based narrative was more effective than the fact-based narrative and the control narrative in increasing non-consumption and green shopping practices, while activism and reuse behaviour were not influenced differently by narrative structure. The TPB was found to be a useful model for assessing non-consumption, such that non-consumption behaviour was predicted by attitudes, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms through the mediating role of behavioural intentions. Non-consumption attitude was the strongest predictor of intentions, and subjective norm was the weakest predictor of intentions. Narrative structures did not have significant effects on the participants’ reported non-consumption attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control or intentions, nor on the relationships between the TPB constructs. The findings suggest that story-based narrative structures are effective tools for delivering climate change information to broad audiences and encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. However, the role of information-based communication should not be discounted. The findings also contribute to the body of research on pro-environmental consumption behaviour by providing a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms of non-consumption, an essential yet understudied domain of sustainable behaviour. / Graduate / 2023-01-12
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/13733 |
| Date | 31 January 2022 |
| Creators | Sehat-pour, Helia |
| Contributors | Piccinin, Andrea Marie, Sukhawathanakul, Paweena |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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