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Project Title:FGZ Cohesion Panel: Wave 2 – Questions on climate change, antisemitism, and gender equality (English Version)
  2. General Information: *Note: The item was tested in German. This is an English translation of the original German wording.
  3. Question Text: How important do you personally consider combating climate change?
    [Wie wichtig schätzen Sie persönlich die Bekämpfung des Klimawandels ein?]
  5. Answer Categories Not important at all [Überhaupt nicht wichtig]

    Rather not important [Eher nicht wichtig]

    Undecided [Teils-teils]

    Rather important [Eher wichtig]

    Very important [Sehr wichtig]

    1. Recommendations: The results of the pretest do not indicate any problems with the question, so it can be left in its current form.
  2. Cognitive Techniques:Information image/link to cognitive pretesting Difficulty Probing
  3. Findings for Question: All 240 respondents answered question 1 using the full range of the response scale. The majority of the test persons (73 %) rated the fight against climate change as "(rather/very) important", one fifth (20 %) answered with "undecided" and just under 7 % with "rather/not important at all". Cognitive techniques were also used to investigate whether the subjects had difficulty answering this question and, if so, what the difficulties were. The corresponding follow-up questions (N1_F1 and N2_F1, see Appendix) were asked of the 124 subjects who were (randomly) assigned to Group 1.

    About 10 % (n = 13) of the respondents indicated that they found it "rather difficult" to answer. How-ever, for none of the respondents was this due to the wording of the question, but rather due to the fact that climate change is a complex issue in which many different aspects have to be taken into account and different measures to combat climate change are assessed differently. In some cases, respondents also stated that they had not yet dealt with climate change sufficiently and had therefore not yet formed a clear opinion:

    • "Because there are many different aspects to consider. It's not a simple topic where you can make a very clear statement." (TP388)
    • "Because a short answer is not necessarily enough. You should already fight climate change, but then please everybody and not only by higher contributions." (TP454)
    • "I don't really know what to answer. I haven't really looked into climate change yet." (TP363)
  2. Question Topic: Environment/ Climate protection
  3. Construct: Importance of combating climate change