Environmental values and environmental concern

Abstract

Attitudes, values and concerns are frequently measured to monitor individual preferences of adolescents. As there is still some discussion about how to monitor those variables with respect to empirical instruments, directions of items or length of instruments, we applied two established scales (2 Major Environmental Value Model [2-MEV] and Environmental Motives Scale [EMS]) to a Slovenian sample of 804 middle and high school students. Subsequently, we confirmed the validity and reliability of both scales as well as their applicability to Slovene subjects, aged 12–18 years. The main objective of our study was to explore the relationship between three factors of environmental concern (EMS) and the two higher-order factors of utilisation of nature and preservation of nature (2-MEV). The results show that altruistic (ALT), biospheric (BIO) and egoistic (EGO) environmental concerns correlate strongly positively with preservation of nature, but negatively and less strongly but still significantly with utilisation of nature. We conclude that raising awareness of EGO environmental concern may be as important as ALT and/or BIO concern for understanding the environmental values and attitudes of an individual. Consequences and recommendations for designing and completing educational programmes are discussed.

Keywords:

• Environmental values
• environmental concerns
• attitude sets
• 2-MEV model
• secondary school students

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this article and the CRSN (The Centre for Research and promotion of Giftedness at the Faculty of Education University of Ljubljana) research group for help and valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregor Torkar

Gregor Torkar works as associate professor at the Department of Biology, Chemistry, and Home Economics at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana. His research field in general is biology and environmental education within the primary, secondary and undergraduate level of education. His current research focus is ecology, evolution and conservational education. He is involved in several national and international research projects on science education and nature conservation.

Franz X. Bogner

Franz X. Bogner (with a PhD in neurobiology, a Habilitation in Biology Education as well as a post-doctoral fellowship at the Cornell University, USA) is the Department head and full professor of the Institute of Biology Education as well as the director of the Z-MNU (Centre of Math & Science Education) at the University of Bayreuth. He and his research group are mainly involved in pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher enhancement. Prof. Bogner’s research projects consistently included cognitive (and emotional and attitudinal) assessment. His citation impact factor is h = 36, his best paper (Bogner 1998) is >500× cited.