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About Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY!)

Americans hold a broad range of opinions about climate change. Global Warming’s Six Americas is an audience segmentation that distinguishes unique groups among the American public who perceive and respond to global warming in different ways. The groups range from the Alarmed, who are very concerned about global warming and support immediate political action to address it, to the Dismissive, who do not believe that the problem is real and thus oppose most climate policies. The Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, and Doubtful are middle groups that differ in their beliefs and knowledge, risk perceptions, political engagement, and behaviors regarding the issue.

SASSY — the Six Americas Short Survey, Yay! is a questionnaire and model that sorts respondents into their respective audience groups based on just four items. The instrument was developed using the original 36-item Six Americas screener (Maibach et al., 2011) and over 18,000 respondents from the Climate Change in the American Mind series of nationally representative surveys. Methodological details about SASSY can be found in Chryst et al., 2018.

SASSY is like a short personality quiz that can help you quickly identify which of the Six Americas you belong to and see how your views about global warming compare with other Americans.

The suggested citation for SASSY is:
Chryst, B., Marlon, J., van der Linden, S., Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., & Roser-Renouf, C. (2018). Global warming’s “Six Americas Short Survey”: Audience segmentation of climate change views using a four question instrument. Environmental Communication12(8), 1109-1122.

SASSY Group Scoring

If you are an educator who wants to compare your students’ views before and after a class, or a researcher who is conducting surveys or experiments with a particular population, or a NGO who wants to better understand your own members, our new SASSY Group tool can help!

The SASSY Group tool allows you to upload your own survey or experimental data in a spreadsheet (csv) to obtain the Six Americas segment scores for each individual in your dataset. SASSY results are immediately processed and added to the spreadsheet as a new column with the segment scores, which can then be downloaded. Summary graphics of your SASSY scores depict your group’s composition and how it compares with Americans as a whole.

To obtain your group’s scores, you need to survey them using the following four questions:

  1. How important is the issue of global warming to you personally?
  • Extremely important
  • Very important
  • Somewhat important
  • Not too important
  • Not at all important
  1. How worried are you about global warming?
  • Very worried
  • Somewhat worried
  • Not very worried
  • Not at all worried
  1. How much do you think global warming will harm you personally?
  • A great deal
  • A moderate amount
  • Only a little
  • Not at all
  • Don’t know
  1. How much do you think global warming will harm future generations of people?
  • A great deal
  • A moderate amount
  • Only a little
  • Not at all
  • Don’t know

The responses to the survey must be entered into a spreadsheet and saved as a “csv” file (the Comma Separated Values file format in the “Save as…” dialogue box Microsoft Excel). Your survey responses must be entered as five columns with the following five headings as seen in our template found here: 1) casenumber; 2) important; 3) worry; 4) personal; 5) future.

The first column must have a unique identification code for each respondent – it can take any form. The next four columns must contain the survey question responses, which must exactly match the wording in the original questions above. Your final csv file should match our template format exactly.

If you or your organization want to discuss how the SASSY group tool can help inform or shape your climate communications or strategy, please reach out to our partnerships team: ypccc.partners@yale.edu.