Environmental Attitudes and Values

Introduction

The emergence of societal awareness of environmental problems was quickly followed by efforts to assess individuals' concerns about environmental quality. Over a thousand published articles reporting empirical investigations of environmental attitudes, beliefs, values, etc. have [Page 365]been published in the past few decades. These studies have employed a huge variety of differing techniques to assess aspects of individuals' concern for the state of the environment, or ‘environmental concern’, leading some observers to see the literature as hopelessly disorganized (Heberlein, 1981: 242). The goal of this entry is to clarify the conceptual foundations of environmental concern and review major assessment techniques employed to measure it.

Conceptual Ambiguities: Environment as an Attitude Object

Heberlein (1981: 242) noted that, ‘The great difficulty with even thinking about environmental attitudes is the ambiguity of the object itself’, and the situation has been exacerbated by the changing nature of environmental problems. Air and water pollution were salient in the 1960s and 1970s; toxic wastes, energy shortages, acid rain, and hazardous technologies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; followed by deforestation, biodiversity, ozone depletion and climate change in the 1990s. Overall, the problems have become less localized and visible, making their awareness more dependent on media and other information sources than on first-hand experience. These trends make the assessment of environmental attitudes even more challenging than Heberlein suggested. Yet, it is possible to provide an overview of empirical research on ‘environmental concern’, the term typically used in the empirical literature (Dunlap & Jones, 2002).

Clarifying the Meaning of ‘Environmental Concern’

Environmental concern refers to the degree to which people are aware of environmental problems and support efforts to solve them and/or indicate a willingness to contribute personally to their solution. Researchers investigating environmental concern must inevitably choose from a wide range of environmental issues or substantive topics and from the numerous ways in which concern over these issues/topics can be expressed by respondents. Consequently, environmental concern is a construct consisting of two conceptual components: ‘environmental topics’ and ‘expressions of concern’ (Dunlap & Jones, 2002; Gray, 1985).

The environmental component represents the substantive content of environmental concern, and is operationalized by the particular topic (e.g. acid rain) or set of topics (e.g. pollution) or broad topic (e.g. environmental degradation) chosen by the researcher from the potential pool of environmental issues. The concern component represents the way in which environmental concern is operationalized via the particular manner employed by the researcher to elicit people's expressions of concern about environmental issues (Dunlap & Jones, 2002).