Mapping climate discourse to climate opinion: An approach for augmenting surveys with social media to enhance understandings of climate opinion in the United States

enacted and can ultimately improve the nation’s ability to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change. In this analysis, we demonstrate that regions with similar climate opinions can have distinct portfolios of social media topics, themes, and events. We augment climate change survey data with Twitter activity to elucidate the connection between survey responses and specific climate change topics. While this analysis pertains specifically to the climate change debate, we use a generalizable framework which can be extended to a variety of other application areas. In future work, we aim to demonstrate the ability of this framework to perform longitudinal assessments of climate opinion. Given a sufficiently large training sample conducive to identi- fying long-term trends in Twitter discussion, longitudinal trends could be monitored to understand changes in climate opinion. Another future avenue for this work is integrating sur- vey design with social media analysis. Survey questions which elicit responses in line with the types of analysis performed on social media (e.g. asking individuals to describe themes and topics when using LDA) could strengthen the future integration of social media and survey analyses. By using methods based on large, publicly available datasets, we can begin to under- stand the relationship between social media discourse and public opinion to produce signifi- cantly more insight than is provided by surveys alone. Supporting information S1 File. (ZIP) Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC), Purdue University’s Center for the Environment (C4E), and the University of Sta- vanger’s Department of Safety, Economics, and Planning. Author Contributions Conceptualization: Jackson Bennett, Benjamin Rachunok, Roshanak Nateghi. Data curation: Jackson Bennett, Benjamin Rachunok. Formal analysis: Jackson Bennett. Investigation: Jackson Bennett. Methodology: Jackson Bennett. Project administration: Jackson Bennett, Roger Flage, Roshanak Nateghi. Software: Jackson Bennett. Supervision: Roger Flage, Roshanak Nateghi. Validation: Jackson Bennett. Visualization: Jackson Bennett, Benjamin Rachunok. Writing – original draft: Jackson Bennett, Benjamin Rachunok. Writing – review & editing: Jackson Bennett, Benjamin Rachunok, Roger Flage, Roshanak Nateghi. PLOS ONE An approach for augmenting surveys with social media to understand climate opinion in the United States PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245319 January 14, 2021 14 / 16