Segmentation of the American Public To Identify Effective Climate Change Issue Frames.

Knowing one's audience is one of the axioms of effective communication, yet scholars often ignore this important aspect of framing research and effects. Understanding audience dynamics is especially important as several decades of research has shown that effectively framing and communicating a complex, contested issue such as climate change is neither simple nor straightforward. In this paper, we demonstrate how audience segmentation analysis, appropriately conducted, can be used to identify motivationally coherent segments of the public for whom appropriate message frames can be identified. In 2007, we conducted a telephone survey of a representative sample of American adults (N=1,980). We asked 21 questions to assess three broad domains: global warming beliefs, behaviors, and policy preferences. Using latent class analysis we identified six distinct audience segments ranging in size from 11 to 22% of the full sample. We report the findings of this analysis, including our inferences and hypotheses about the optimal issue frames for each segment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]