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Environmental Attitudes in 28 European Countries Derived From Atheoretically Compiled Opinions and Self-Reports of Behavior
[journal article]
Abstract People differ in their personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The question is, can we validly measure people's commitment by what they say and what they claim they do in opinion polls? In our research, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of past behavior ... view more
People differ in their personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The question is, can we validly measure people's commitment by what they say and what they claim they do in opinion polls? In our research, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of past behavior can be aggregated into comparable depictions of people's personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment (i.e., their environmental attitudes). In contrast to the commonly used operational scaling approaches, we ground our measure of people’s environmental attitudes in a mathematically formalized psychological theory of the response process - the Campbell paradigm. This theory of the response process has already been extensively validated, and its relevance for manifest behavior has repeatedly been shown as well. In our secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data (N = 27,998) from 28 European countries, we apply the Campbell paradigm to a set of indicators that was not originally collected to be aggregated into a single scale. With our research, we propose a distinct way to measure behavior-relevant environmental attitudes that can be used even with a set of indicators that was originally atheoretically compiled. Overall, our study suggests that the Campbell paradigm provides a sound psychological measurement theory that can be applied to cross-cultural comparisons in the environmental protection domain.... view less
Keywords
Eurobarometer; environmental behavior; environmental safety; attitude research; attitude; consumption; intercultural comparison
Classification
Social Psychology
Ecology, Environment
Free Keywords
attitude measurement; attitude-behavior consistency; Campbell paradigm; green consumption; Eurobarometer 81.3 (2014) (ZA5914 v3.0.0)
Document language
English
Publication Year
2022
Page/Pages
p. 1-11
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology, 13 (2022)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875419
ISSN
1664-1078
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed