Oakland County's View of Climate Change

Lab 5: Questions that matter

Pictured: Michigan State students, Kevin Hayes and Nora Kaltenbach hold signs at the 'Climate 911' protest in East Lansing on Sunday, Oct. 10, 2021. Students and student activist groups gathered on October 10th to demand action be taken by government officials to reduce climate change.

Climate change is an important issue but not all would agree. Some people in Oakland County don't believe they've been affected by climate change nor do they believe that climate change and its effect on wildlife is a crisis. Some don't even know what climate change is, while others are well aware what it is and it's effects.

My cowriters, Ashley Abduok and Sarah Hill, and I wanted to explore this issue

by crowdsourcing people in Oakland County to gain more information on their understanding/feelings for the topic. To achieve this, we created a survey and asked three general questions about climate change:

1. Do you know what climate change is?

a. Yes

b. No

c. Maybe

2. Are you affected by climate change?

a. Yes

b. No

c. Maybe

3. Do you believe that climate change and its effect on wildlife is a crisis?

a. Yes

b. No

c. Maybe

The general idea of the story Ashley, Sarah and I would write would focus on our community, Oakland County, and not only if they are affected by climate change, but if they are educated on the topic and whether or not they think it is a major crisis when it comes to wildlife.

While doing some research, we found an article that specifically talks about Climate Crowd – a global online crowdsourcing tool that allows anyone who are working in remote areas to collect and share data on how people are adapting to or coping with climate change. Ultimately their goal is to use their data to find solutions that help people and ecosystems adapt to climate change without harming nature. Another article talks about crowdsourcing solutions to climate change . Ultimately, it is about making a difference and educating people, which would be the general idea of our story.

We then moved to the crowd sourcing portion of our research. We created a Google Form to collect and organize data. During these times of social distancing, we found it easier to reach people for our crowdsourcing measures virtually. We each posted on our social media accounts asking people to participate in the study. In addition to that, we personally sent our form to friends, families, coworkers, etc.

When conducting the crowd-sourcing and tailoring our questions, we made sure to follow this set of guidelines:

1. Be specific

2. Be brief. Lots of questions or questions loaded with words would risk people getting restless and either not finishing or begin to answer questions without thinking just to get finished.

3. Create crowd diversity. For this reason, we sought answers from everywhere. Since we all know different sets of people, this was a good way to reach a diverse crowd to ensure we were not receiving one-sided answers or answers biased by just one set of demographics.

On Monday, November 8th, 2021, Makaila Gaston, Sarah Hill and Ashley Abduok asked a series of questions in Oakland County and compiled data. The data helps to better understand Oakland County's understanding and viewpoint of climate change.

We received 53 responses and of those responses, we found that 88.5% of these people were aware of what climate change is, while 11.5% answered “maybe.” When asked, “Are you affected by climate change?” 53.8% answered “yes,” while 17.3% reported not being affected by climate change and 28.8% categorized themselves as “maybe” being affected by climate change.

Our last question was, “Do you believe that climate change and its effects on wildlife is a crisis?” 88.5% believed this to be true while 5.8% answered “no” and 5.8% answered “maybe.” As our last step, we organized our findings into infographics. We found it was better to understand and digest the information visually.

We were not surprised to see the general consensus on the issue was yes - people do know what climate change is - but were not quite sure if they personally have been affected by it in some way. Using Twitter seemed to very effective. Because we created a Google Form, it was easy for participants to submit their answers and for the data to be accurately divided. If we were to do anything differently, we could utilize more than one social media platform to generate even more responses. Overall, we were able to learn a lot about what some citizens of Oakland County know about climate change which will help drive our future research.