In summer 2013, Abt SRBI conducted a series of eight surveys for the “Climate Change Attitudes and Beliefs Survey” for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which included 5,700 telephone interviews. The survey collected public opinion data on a wide range of issues including attitude towards and awareness of global warming and climate change, support for public policy options, as well as demographic and behavioral data from a representative sample of adults in the U.S., as well as adults residing in Ohio, California, Colorado, Texas, South Carolina, and the metropolitan statistical areas corresponding to San Francisco, Calif. and Columbus, Ohio.

Abt SRBI performed all aspects of data collection from this study, including programming of the instrument, telephone interviews in English and Spanish, data production, quality control, imputation and weighting. We carefully crafted sample design and allocation to attain an optimal allocation for the study and monitored call designs to increase cooperation and reduce non-response. We weighted data to adjust for unequal probabilities of selection in the sample and non-response bias. Imputation was used to necessarily fill in missing values for variables that were used in the weighting, including the number of adults in the household, telephone service, age, education, race/ethnicity, and geographic region. Yale University used this survey data for their Six Americas study.

Abt SRBI also conducted – with support by a NOAA Sea Grant and in collaboration with the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication – a storm preparedness survey of residents of coastal Connecticut storm inundation zones. A self-administered mail survey and stratified sample using address-based sampling was used. Abt worked with Yale University to develop the survey including sampling plan and mail data collection protocol and managed the successful implementation of the study. Abt also collaborated in writing final reports with the Yale research team.