Measuring Environmental Values and Identity
Aaron C. Sparks, Geoffrey Henderson, Shyam K. Sriram, Eric R. A. N. Smith
Abstract
Scholars who study environmental problems across the social sciences often require a measure of the lens through which people filter information. Many scales have been created to serve in this analytical role, including the New Ecological Paradigm, the Connectedness to Nature Scale, environmentalist identity and environmental movement identity, and the cultural cognition scales. To our knowledge, no study compares them in a single sample. We used a national Internet sample to examine the measures’ predictive powers in explaining a range of environmental behaviors. Connectedness to Nature and environmentalist identity were the strongest predictors of pro-environmental behavior in our sample, and our findings also suggested a difference in private versus public behaviors. Environmentalist identity was slightly stronger than the Connectedness to Nature in predicting public behaviors, while Connectedness to Nature was the strongest predictor of private behaviors. The New Ecological Paradigm and the cultural cognition scales were weaker predictors.