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As the effects of climate change begin to manifest themselves in different ways across the globe, scholars are increasingly interested in studying how such climate-related events are understood through narratives, or stories, and how the stories can be a precursor to action, at both individual and collective levels, to reduce emissions and to adapt to current and future changes. The future is also the object of narrative imaginings, in which expected or possible events form a narrative structure, comprising temporal and causal relations centered on a cast of characters, such as heroes, villains, and victims. Understanding how climate change narratives are constructed, how they circulate in society, and how they impact people’s understanding and willingness to act, may be of vital importance for developing the right communicative tools to stimulate action at all levels of society, from the individual to political institutions. This effort depends on contributions from a multitude of fields, such as climate science, psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and political science.

In recent years, increased Internet access and new communication technologies have led to the development of online methods for gathering public opinion and behavioral data related to controversial issues like climate change. To help climate-change researchers better adapt to the new era of online-based research, a review of, and methodological applications for, prevailing Internet-based research methods are provided here. Online surveys have become more common in the last decade for several reasons, including their relatively low administration cost, the pervasiveness of Internet communication, and declining response rates associated with traditional survey methods. Experiments embedded within online surveys have also become a useful tool for examining the extent to which online communications influence publics’ attitudes and behaviors. Other research methods that have gained growing attention from scholars are content analyses of online communication using big data approaches. By mining the seemingly infinite amount of user-generated content extracted from different social media sites, researchers are able to analyze issue awareness, responses to instant news, and emerging sentiments. This article provides a detailed overview of these Internet-based research methods, including their potential advantages and pitfalls, their applications in the science-communication and climate-change research fields, as well as suggestions for future research.