Climate conversations: Discursive strategies of climate justice organizing - Part 2

This data set consists of 37 conversations between US climate activists and people they knew who were not involved in climate action. The conversations occurred in 2022-2023. Files include video or audio recordings (as .mp4, .mov, and .m4a files) and text transcripts generated by Otter.ai (as .txt files). Climate activists were asked to recruit conversational partners (people they knew who were not involved in climate action) and have a series of three discussions about climate change, climate action, and climate justice. They were asked to space the conversations approximately three weeks apart, with the first conversation lasting 1 hour and subsequent conversations lasting 30 minutes. In the first conversation, they were asked to talk about the severity of the climate crisis, the existence of viable solutions, climate (in)justice (for instance, the unequal causes and effects of the climate crisis), and, if possible, specific opportunities for collective climate action. In the second and third conversations, they were asked to see if their partner had any further thoughts, ask whether they had been able to take action, and discuss why or why not. Conversations were conducted over Zoom or in person according to participants’ preference. All recordings are contributed with the consent of both partners. These recordings are part of a larger data set of 140 conversations (not all participants opted to publicly archive their conversations). The accompanying ATLAS.ti file includes a qualitative coding analysis of conversation transcripts. In addition, the data set includes participants’ survey responses in the form of .csv files. Activists and partners took a survey before their first conversation and after each conversation, and partners took a follow-up survey three months after the third conversation. A survey-only control group did not participate in any conversations, but took similar surveys on the same timeline as the partners in the treatment group. A no-intervention control group took a retrospective survey about their climate change–related attitudes and behaviors over the study duration.