🎯 Context

Last lesson covered environmental worldviews, the three broad categories used to classify them, and the environmental value system as a model of inputs and outputs.

This lesson is about change. Worldviews and the perspectives that sit inside them are not fixed, and the syllabus names three things that shift them: government campaigns, NGO campaigns, and social and demographic change.

By the end of the lesson you should be able to describe how and why perspectives change over time, and interpret a behaviour-time graph without claiming more from it than the data supports.

Phase 1: Three ways a perspective changes

1.1.9 Perspectives and the beliefs that underpin them change over time in all societies. They can be influenced by government or non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns or through social and demographic change.

Application of skills: Interpret behaviour-time graphs. Examples could include specific changes, such as smoking, littering, eating meat or how traditional lifestyles in indigenous cultures are being replaced by modern ones.

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The statement names three routes. They are not equally powerful and they do not work in the same way.

A governmental organisation is part of a national or regional government and acts with its legal authority. It can do things nobody else can: tax a product, ban it from certain places, or require a warning on the packet. It can also simply campaign. The Federal Office of Public Health launched its SmokeFree campaign on 10 January 2011, which is persuasion rather than law, and you will see in a moment how hard it is to prove that persuasion worked.

A non-governmental organisation is independent of government and has no legal power at all. It works by persuading, publicising and applying pressure, and in Switzerland it can go further than that. The popular initiative on tobacco advertising was launched by public health organisations, not by the government, and the government opposed it. It passed on 13 February 2022 with 56.6% of the vote.

Social and demographic change is different again, because nobody is campaigning. Populations get older, more urban, more educated and more international, and what counts as normal changes with them. This route is the slowest and it is the easiest to miss, because there is no launch date to point at.

Distinguish between a governmental organisation and a non-governmental organisation. One sentence each.
The tobacco advertising initiative was launched by health organisations, opposed by the government, and then written into the constitution by voters. Suggest which of the three routes it best fits, and explain why the answer is not obvious.
Give one thing your household does differently from ten years ago that no campaign asked for.

Phase 2: How to read a behaviour-time graph

A behaviour-time graph puts time on the horizontal axis and a measured behaviour on the vertical axis. The syllabus asks you to interpret them, which is a narrower job than it sounds.

Four moves, in order.

State the overall direction, with figures and years. Not "it goes down", but from what, to what, and between when and when.
Name the turning points. Most real series change direction at least once. A trend described as one smooth movement is usually a trend that has not been read properly.
Say what the graph does not show. Which years are missing, what exactly was measured, and who was asked.
Keep dates separate from causes. A law passing in a particular year tells you when something happened, not that it changed anything. Correlation means two things changed together. It is not the same as one causing the other, and a graph on its own can almost never tell you which you are looking at.

Watch your command terms here. Describe asks what the data shows. Explain asks why. Suggest asks for a reasonable possibility you cannot prove. Answering the wrong one is the most common way to lose marks on a data question.

A graph shows a point for 1990 and its next point for 2014, with nothing plotted in between. State one thing you can say about 2002 and one thing you cannot.

Phase 3: Smoking in Switzerland

Source: Federal Statistical Office, Swiss Health Survey, La consommation de tabac de 1992 à 2022, July 2024.

Smoking is the first example the syllabus gives, and Switzerland has measured it every five years since 1992 through the Swiss Health Survey, which asked around 22,000 people in 2022.

The shape is not a decline. It rises from 30% in 1992 to 33% in 1997, falls to 28% by 2007, sits almost still through 2017 at 27%, then drops to 24% in 2022. Anyone who describes this as smoking going down has skipped two thirds of the graph.

Underneath the total, three things moved differently. Men fell from 37% to 27%, women only from 24% to 21%. Heavy smokers, meaning twenty or more cigarettes a day, fell from 41% of smokers to 18%. And a gap opened by education: in 1992 there was almost no difference, while in 2022 20% of people with a tertiary qualification smoked compared with 25% of those with no post-compulsory qualification.

Three dates matter. The federal law protecting against passive smoking came into force on 1 May 2010. The SmokeFree campaign launched in January 2011. The advertising initiative passed in February 2022, but the Tobacco Products Act only came into force on 1 October 2024, and the ban on advertising in print and online was set to follow in 2026.

Describe the trend shown between 1992 and 2022. Use figures and years, and name every change of direction.
The passive smoking law came into force in May 2010. Using the graph, explain why you cannot say that it caused smoking to fall.
The advertising vote passed in February 2022 and the 2022 figure is the lowest in the series. Give the reason why that vote cannot explain the fall.
In 1992 there was almost no difference in smoking by level of education, and by 2022 there was a gap of five percentage points. Suggest what this tells you about who government campaigns reach.

🎯 Context

Phase 1: Three ways a perspective changes

Distinguish between a governmental organisation and a non-governmental organisation. One sentence each.

The tobacco advertising initiative was launched by health organisations, opposed by the government, and then written into the constitution by voters. Suggest which of the three routes it best fits, and explain why the answer is not obvious.

Give one thing your household does differently from ten years ago that no campaign asked for.

Phase 2: How to read a behaviour-time graph

A graph shows a point for 1990 and its next point for 2014, with nothing plotted in between. State one thing you can say about 2002 and one thing you cannot.

Phase 3: Smoking in Switzerland

Describe the trend shown between 1992 and 2022. Use figures and years, and name every change of direction.

The passive smoking law came into force in May 2010. Using the graph, explain why you cannot say that it caused smoking to fall.

The advertising vote passed in February 2022 and the 2022 figure is the lowest in the series. Give the reason why that vote cannot explain the fall.

In 1992 there was almost no difference in smoking by level of education, and by 2022 there was a gap of five percentage points. Suggest what this tells you about who government campaigns reach.

Phase 4: What Switzerland puts in the right bin