Understanding Climate Change Attitudes (3 Years

Postdoc Sociology; Understanding climate change attitudes (3 years, 0.8 fte) Published Tuesday 14 Jul 2026 Deadline Thursday 13 Aug 2026 Work area Academic staff Organisational unit Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB) Salary € 4.728 - € 6.433 Employment 0.8 fte - 0.8 fte Introduction While a voluminous literature has mapped the social groups most and least concerned about climate change, a crucial lacuna remains: what does climate change actually mean to people? What do they believe is happening? Scholarship has typically focused on explaining people's level of concern and how strongly they believe in anthropogenic climate change-without acknowledging that the same answer given to survey questions means different things to different people . Moreover, extant research has focused on the factors that explain levels of concern among the public as a whole, ignoring that specific factors likely matter more for some groups than for others because the meanings they ascribe to climate change differ . This project (funded through the Vici programme of the Dutch Research Council, NWO) reorients the field by systematically studying population heterogeneity in such meanings and thus reveal which factors matter for which groups-and why. This will illuminate hitherto scattered findings. The project's objectives are to: 1) uncover the different meanings the public attaches to climate change; Building on innovative research developed at the Erasmus Institute on Culture and Stratification, the project harnesses the advantages of in-depth qualitative and large-scale quantitative research with its sequential, mixed-methods toolkit. This includes focus groups (which have already been completed), Correlational Class Analyses, survey-experiments and discrete choice experiments. The postdoc project advertised here will focus on the quantitative studies in Italy and run in parallel with a PhD project focused on the...