Dewitt et al 2016: A new tool to map the major worldviews in the Netherlands and USA, and explore how they relate to climate change
Academic-quality effort to develop an integral / spiral dynamics worldview questionnaire with real-world testing on a representative sample in Netherlands and the US
“A new tool to map the major worldviews in the Netherlands and USA, and explore how they relate to climate change” is a 2016 paper in Environmental Science & Policy by Annick De Witt, Joop de Boer, Nic Hedlund and Patricia Osseweijer.
Abstract:
For addressing climate change, public support for changes in policy is needed, as well changes in individual lifestyles. Both of these appear to be intimately related with people’s worldviews. Understanding these worldviews is therefore essential. In order to research and ‘map’ them, we translated the theoretical ‘Integrative Worldview Framework’ (IWF) into an empirical, quantitative approach. We constructed a worldview-scale aiming to distinguish between four major worldviews – labeled traditional, modern, postmodern, and integrative – and explored their interface with opinions and behaviors with respect to climate change. The survey was conducted with representative samples of citizens in the Netherlands and the USA (n = 527 and n = 556). The hypothesized worldviews were found in the data with a reasonable degree of reliability, especially in the Dutch sample. We also found consistent relationships between these worldview-clusters and a range of opinions, political priorities, and behaviors. In both countries postmoderns and integratives displayed significantly more concern about climate change as well as more sustainable behaviors, compared with moderns and traditionals. The implications of these findings for environmental policy and social science are noteworthy.
Comments
🫢 Aside: use the classic angle of climate change to motivate (and likely fund) the paper. Pure cultural evolution work would likely not get funded i suspect.
🎉 Create a proper worldview questionnaire and try it out with a representative sample in the Netherlands and the US.
🧶 Wiki entry source with more detailed excerpts 👉
https://notes.lifeitself.org/books/dewitt-ea-2016-new-tool-map
Excerpts
Worldview definitions
Worldview correlates with position on issues
NB: the topics are the classic ones that come from world values or Schwarz cultural values.
Colophon
Archived PDF
Great that you flagged this up Rufus, and v helpful extracts. Fascinating work and a very well designed framework for the questionnaire design. How might we build on this using narratives sensemaking with AI scaffolding / AI signification of developmental constructs? Instead of the the multiple choice question design that they used from mainstream market survey contractors (they used https://www.motivaction.nl/en/) ...My biased line of inquiry!