Clinical trial NCT04919148: Perceptions of Weather Risks and Climate Beliefs Among the Hong Kong General Public
Official title: Climate Change Beliefs, Perceived Risk of Heat Stress and Responses to Heat Health Warnings Among the General Public of Hong Kong: a Mixed-methods Study
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Weather Risk Perception
Lead sponsor: The University of Hong Kong
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2021-06-09
Enrollment: 429
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: Background: Local abnormal heat events may be used as proxies for communicating the health impacts of climate change when people physically feel the effects to reduce the psychological distance of climate change and improve public engagement with climate and weather risk. However, there are concerns that this strategy may be more effective for climate believers, and that it may somewhat compromise the scientific precision because it may lead to erroneous beliefs that climate change is merely characterized by temperature rises or extreme heat but ignore other extreme weather events such as flood and extreme cold, and that cold spells are interpreted as evidence of no climate change. None of these potential effects and concerns has been tested.

Aims: This proposed study is aimed to explore patterns of climate beliefs and their influences on perceptions of heat-related risks and responses to heat health warnings in the general public of Hong Kong; (2) Test the preliminary effects of a revised heat health warning (RHHW) that incorporates information about the health impacts of climate change into existing heat health warning on perceived heat-related risk and climate beliefs.

Design and subjects: This will be a mix-methods study comprising in-depth qualitative interviews, a population-based cohort survey and a pilot randomized control trial (RCT). Subjects will be the general Hong Kong Chinese adults aged ≥18 years.

Main outcome measures: Latent class analysis will be conducted to examine patterns of climate beliefs while structural equation modelling to test the relationships among climate beliefs, perceived heat-related risks and behavioural responses to heat warnings. Qualitative data will be analysed using thematic content analysis while the effect of RHHW will be tested using t-test and linear regression models.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Participants should own a mobile phone and be able to read Chinese.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Participants with no mobile phone or cannot understand Chinese will be excluded.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Emotional engagement with heat and climate change risk (emotional valence)
timeFrame: One week after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Emotional engagement with heat and climate change risk (discrete emotion)
timeFrame: One week after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Short-term effect of risk perception toward heat and climate change risk
timeFrame: One week after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Long-term effect of risk perception toward heat and climate change
timeFrame: One month after completion of all messages delivery
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Short-term effect of self-efficacy in taking pro-environment actions
timeFrame: One week after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Long-term effect of self-efficacy in taking pro-environment actions
timeFrame: One month after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Short-term effect of intention in taking pro-environment actions
timeFrame: One week after completion of all messages delivery
measure: Long-term effect of intention in taking pro-environment actions
timeFrame: One month after completion of all messages delivery
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Hong Kong
country: Hong Kong
facility: University of Hong Kong School of Public Health
Study officials:
References: