Climate change lifestyle narratives among Norwegian citizens: A linguistic analysis of survey discourse

Abstract

The present study proposes an analysis of climate change (CC) narratives in answers to an open-ended survey question, where we ask what a climate-friendly lifestyle may imply. The representative survey has been conducted online by the Norwegian Citizen Panel/DIGSSCORE, located at the University of Bergen. The survey provided 1,149 answers from respondents across Norway. The analysis combines a lexical and a text linguistic approach (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017), based on Adam's (2008) analysis of the narrative text sequence (initial situation–complication–(re)action–resolution–final situation), and inspired by the Narrative Policy Framework's (NPF) notions of plot and narrative characters (Jones et al., 2014). Our analysis identified four main topics: consumption, transportation, politics, and energy, while the cast of characters is dominated by the first-person singular, frequently portrayed as hero, and the first-person plural in a predominantly villainous role. The frequent use of negation and argumentative connectives reflects the contentious nature of the issue.