Research in Progress: How should environmental non-profits talk about racial disparities?

By Chris Skurka, Penn State University, Helen Joo and Rainer Romero-Canyas, Environmental Defense Fund

It should come as no surprise that air pollution is bad for public health and well-being. Globally, air pollution accounts for over 6 million premature deaths related to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Children in particular are vulnerable to air pollution harms as their bodies and brains develop.

Unfortunately, air pollution does not impact all communities equally. Black communities are exposed to greater levels of air pollution than White communities. Underlying health conditions, access to quality healthcare, and other factors make Black individuals especially vulnerable to health burdens linked to breathing unclean air. Black children face disproportionately high rates of asthma and asthma-related deaths.

In recent years, environmental non-profit organizations, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), have turned their attention to this issue. Their hope is to develop outreach messaging strategies that can raise awareness of racial disparities linked to air pollution and enhance support for clear air solutions.

But communicating about racial disparities to stakeholders is easier said than done.

On the one hand, disparity-focused messages are likely to draw the attention of Black audiences, increasing their awareness and perceived risk for the harms of air pollution. These outcomes in turn should lead to greater support for clean air initiatives.

On the other hand, disparity messages could have unintended effects — particularly among White audiences. By highlighting the comparatively higher rates of pollution-related harms among Black communities, disparity-focused messages may inadvertently reduce how susceptible White individuals believe they are to air pollution effects. Moreover, White publics may avoid disparity messages altogether because they feel the information simply isn’t that relevant to them.

How can practitioners most strategically communicate about the racially disparate impacts of air pollution to engage all relevant publics?

We aim to address this question in our research, which will experimentally compare two different message frames about air pollution impacts:

• A child health frame: A message that frames air pollution as an issue that negatively impacts children’s health. Research suggests this kind of frame is most likely to be palatable to audiences regardless of race.
• A racial disparity frame: A message that frames air pollution as an issue has an outsized negative impact on Black children. Research suggests this kind of frame is most likely to trigger polarizing responses.

Our research design will test not only the influence of these message frames on individuals’ emotional reactions, beliefs, and support for clean air solutions, but also incorporate message choice by allowing participants to browse from an array of messages (including distractor messages) in a mock Google search task.

This browsing task will simulate what it’s like to select (and avoid) media content in the modern digital age. As a result, we will have a better idea as to whether these different ways of communicating about the impacts of air pollution may be more or less likely to draw people’s attention in the first place.

Importantly, we will run analyses that reveal whether these patterns are different for members of different racial groups.

Based on the findings from this research, we will be able to offer environmental non-profits (and strategic environmental communicators more broadly) concrete recommendations for how to best talk about this issue with their stakeholders. Our findings will also shed light on important theoretical questions, such as the psychological mechanisms by which disparity messages influence publics and whether (and why) different publics selectively consume or skip over disparity messages.

For more information about this study, email Skurka at cjs7142@psu.edu, Joo at hjoo@edf.org, or Romero-Canyas at rromero@edf.org. Findings of this study will be shared next year. This study is a part of the Center’s 2022 Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant call for research proposals focusing on sustainability communication.