Understanding the Gateway: Unpacking the Mechanisms, Boundaries, and Outcomes of Climate Consensus Messaging

Study Goal and Dataset description

The dataset contains data from a national representative sample of the German population regarding gender and age (N = 1515, 941 after applying all exclusion criteria).

The data is from an online survey conducted via the data collection company Bilendi.

The goal of our study for which the data was collected, was to investigate the influence of consensus messaging on the Perceived scientific Consensus.

The folder raw includes the raw survey data.

The folder auxillary includes information on all participants that did not pass the quality control.

The folder processed includes the cleaned data for the analyses

The folder analysis includes the code for data preparation data_prepCCstudy and for calculating the descriptive statistic and testing the hypotheses data_analyses_CCstudy.

For more information regarding the study design and hypotheses one can have a look at our preregistration: OSF Registries | “The Role of Perceived Scientific Consensus on Learning about Climate Change from a Educational Video - A Gateway Belief Model Approach”

This is an updated version of the initial data analysis script. The following was updated/changed:

• Inclusion of covariate (education)
• Reorganization of hypotheses to fit paper structure
• Consistent use of Bayesian mixed-effects models
• Added Bayesian mediation analysis (Group -> PSC -> Climate Beliefs -> Learning)
• Removed Reactance analysis
• Added CFA for climate belief scale