10.5a Heat Waves, Race, Class, and Gender
During the 1990s, another deadly heat wave was the focus of sociological analysis. Klinenberg (2002) conducted a content analysis of newspaper graphics from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave. Content analysis is a research method where the researcher codes images or text for their themes and patterns. He coded each image for its theme and found that images were of coping mechanisms, such as children playing in the water, and death, such as dead bodies and the morgue. It is unknown whether a formal content analysis of journalistic images of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave would yield similar results overall. Still, the early photos promoted individual coping mechanisms, such as playing in a water fountain and drinking more water, rather than structural solutions, like reducing emissions or planting more trees in urban areas.
Klinenberg (2002) found that the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave journalistic accounts deemphasized social factors related to the event. These social factors turned out to be critical in terms of risk. In the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, 739 people died of heat-related causes. Those who died were disproportionately Black, older (aged 65 or older), poor, and living alone. In other words, some groups were at greater risk of heat-related death than others.
Related research finds that the public’s feeling of danger from extreme heat is correlated with sociodemographic factors (Howe et al., 2019). These sociodemographic factors, however, do not reliably reflect actual risk. For example, in their nationally representative survey of 9,217 respondents, researchers found that older people perceive less risk from extreme heat, even though they are disproportionately likely to die during heat waves. Suppose individuals understand heat waves to be not that dangerous. In that case, they may not take precautions during a heat wave by going to a cooling center, drinking more water, checking in on their neighbors, or providing financial assistance to people to help them cope with the heat. For example, Stewart (2024) finds that people are more supportive of giving economic help to people to pay for heat rather than air conditioning.
Photo 10.18
Sociological Research Found that Older Black Men Were At Higher Risk of Death During the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave
Understanding how the media and the public socially construct heat waves and other climate risks has implications for policymakers and communities. For instance, geographers, however, have found that journalistic images influence the public’s understanding of the importance of climate change and whether people feel they can do anything about it (O’Neill et al., 2013). Scholars have also studied whether images can motivate people to act. Flint et al. (2022) studied whether pictures of a burning house compared to landscape photos of homes without fire would prompt homeowners to seek more information about their wildfire risk. They found that homeowners who viewed the images online reported they would take the same actions regardless of the image viewed. In an experiment where the researchers sent homeowners postcards, “the negative imagery decreased webpage visits as homeowners’ wildfire risk increased” (Flint et al., 2022, p. 1).