Beyond Climate Change Acceptance: Latent Profiles of Environmental Values, Concern and Responsibility in Europe

Existing literature extensively explores the relationship between climate change perceptions and environmental values; however, these studies predominantly use variable-centered approaches, which often overlook unobservable individual differences. This study addresses this gap by identifying latent classes among respondents from participating countries based on their climate change perceptions, perceived personal responsibility, and environmental value orientations. We analyzed data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 11 integrated file, Edition 4.2, with a final complete-case analytic sample of 44,338 respondents from 30 countries (29 European countries and Israel). Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), we applied five indicator variables representing concern about climate change, perceived personal responsibility, beliefs about climate change causes, and environmental values. We also employed the R3STEP approach to assess the associations of age, gender, and educational attainment with latent class membership. Our findings identified three latent profiles among respondents from participating countries, characterized by varying levels of climate change concern, environmental value orientations, and perceived personal responsibility. These profiles exhibited graded differences, particularly in climate change concern and perceived personal responsibility, reflecting heterogeneity in climate-related attitudes and value orientations. Moreover, the automatic R3STEP procedure indicated that gender, age group, and educational attainment were each significantly associated with latent profile membership after adjustment for the other demographic covariates. Overall, these results indicate substantial heterogeneity in climate change perceptions and environmental values within the pooled ESS Round 11 analytic sample and demonstrate the usefulness of a person-centered approach for characterizing this heterogeneity.