An empirical test of anchoring the NEP scale in environmental ethics

Abstract

Some argue that the new ecological paradigm (NEP) scale is incomplete and does not adequately reflect contemporary debates in environmental ethics. We focus on one specific shortcoming of the NEP, its lack of an item to reflect an ecocentric viewpoint. To test this concern, we administered the NEP to three different audiences and included one additional item to capture an ecocentric perspective. The empirical tests were designed to determine whether the addition of such an item changed results in a meaningful way. We find evidence that NEP may already capture ecocentric viewpoints, but our investigation leads us to question the validity and reliability of the NEP in capturing ecological worldview.

Keywords:

• new ecological paradigm (NEP) scale
• environmental ethics
• factor analysis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge funding support by National Science Foundation award: EPS-0904155 to Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine. We thank the members of Maine's SSI, the participants at the Maine Water Conference, Maine Wind Conference, and the people of Maine for taking the time to participate in this initiative. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for recommendations that improved this paper.

Notes

1. When agree strongly is scored as 1.

2. Missing values in these last two approaches either call for the observation to be dropped from the analysis or for missing value to be replaced with some proxy value, e.g the mean response for that item.

3. A standard orthogonal rotation in the statistical program SAS is known as Varimax; while a standard oblique rotation is Promax.

4. Data-sets should be individually examined for correlation between items of the NEP and total correlation to determine appropriate rotation.

5. Administered via surveymonkey© (online data collection tool).

6. The University of Maine’s SSI is an NSF-EPSCoR funded interdisciplinary research initiative focused on the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of sustainability challenges. Thus, faculty members involved in this initiative are a subset University of Maine faculty.

7. We recognize that factor analysis is generally completed on samples containing 100 or more observations.

8. Results available from Caroline Noblet at: [email protected].

9. The authors are unaware of any statistical test which allows for direct statistical comparison between two Cronbach’s α for the same set of metrics.

10. The loading of NEP scale items to different factors is a result also found by Bogner and Wiseman (2002).