| A rhetorical investigation of energy-related environmental issues identifies significant contextual features and variables that should be considered in designing effective messages and information campaigns for energy consumers. This analysis reveals five components that should be examined and addressed in the construction of such messages and campaigns: (1) exigencies associated with energy-related environmental issues, (2) socio-political contextual features that influence public dialogue and the availability of energy-related environmental information, (3) competing paradigm structures that directly affect the forming of environmental publics, policy, and cultural norms, (4) theoretical concepts and models that can provide frameworks and guidelines for effective construction and promulgation of energy-related environmental messages, and (5) specific variables and factors that comprise and influence energy-related environmental beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.; The variables that comprise and influence energy-related environmental beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors are placed within Fishbein's Model of Reasoning so that the relationships among them can be illustrated and examined. This modeling of variables also provides a framework for testing and operationalizing particular variables with message content. Research findings identify four variables that constitute energy-related environmental beliefs: knowledge of the issue (i.e. perception of scarcity, know ledge of energy processes, personal contribution and con sequences, and general solution strategies), knowledge of action strategies and skills, prototypes and referents, and paradigm perspectives. These four beliefs variables, then, influence five variables that constitute energy-related environmental attitudes: personal evaluations of the issue, perception of personal responsibility, locus of control, personal evaluations of normative beliefs, and sensitivity. In order to illustrate how the variables and information identified in the rhetorical investigation might be actualized in the construction of messages related to a particular consumer energy behavior, the proposed modeling of variables is used as a framework for a heuristic experimental study. This experimental study is designed to test the influence of one particular variable found at the beliefs level—action strategies and skills, or mobilizing information—on consumers' attitudes and intentions to behave toward a specific energy-related topic, the employment of domestic solar water heaters. |
