Environmental conservation as a topic of discourse is receiving more attention as the effects humans have on the planet are growing more apparent. Growing alongside this is the need for people to participate in conservation practices, and the need for social scientists to understand what causes people to enact environmentally friendly behaviors. Much research has been done on the topic of the relationship between attitudes and behaviors (Dunlap and Van Liere 1978; Scott and Willitis 1994; Tarrant and Cordell 1997). However, the correlation between attitudes and behaviors was weak. In the search for more concrete answers, scholars started examining the relationship between identity and behaviors (Stets and Burke 1996; Davidson and Freudenburg
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It was believed that the main reason people acted on things was how they felt about a certain situation or problem (Tarrant and Cordell 1997; Stets and Biga 2003). In order to understand people’s environmental behaviors, the attitude-behavior theory was applied to the study of environmentalism and conservation practices. In 1978, Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere sought to come up with a way to measure individual attitudes about climate change and, in turn, asserted the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale. The scale consisted of twelve items that ranged from whether humans were abusing the planet to whether plants existed only for our usage, and the answers were formatted as a Likert scale--ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree (Dunlap and Van Liere 1978). Since then, some scholars have used the NEP scale to examine the relationship between attitudes about climate change and behaviors (Scott and Willitis 1994; Tarrant and Cordell 1997). Nevertheless, the links between the two proved to be weak (Scott and Willitis …show more content…
The distribution of my independent variable, gender, was fairly even among the respondents. For a visual representation please refer to Figure 1. In regard to general trends in beliefs about climate change, most of the respondents reported it as a problem that should be addressed. Most of the respondents reported hearing a lot or some information about global warming. Over half of the respondents reported global warming as a serious problem with a high priority. Furthermore, only 13% of respondents reported global warming to have no serious
It was believed that the main reason people acted on things was how they felt about a certain situation or problem (Tarrant and Cordell 1997; Stets and Biga 2003). In order to understand people’s environmental behaviors, the attitude-behavior theory was applied to the study of environmentalism and conservation practices. In 1978, Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere sought to come up with a way to measure individual attitudes about climate change and, in turn, asserted the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale. The scale consisted of twelve items that ranged from whether humans were abusing the planet to whether plants existed only for our usage, and the answers were formatted as a Likert scale--ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree (Dunlap and Van Liere 1978). Since then, some scholars have used the NEP scale to examine the relationship between attitudes about climate change and behaviors (Scott and Willitis 1994; Tarrant and Cordell 1997). Nevertheless, the links between the two proved to be weak (Scott and Willitis …show more content…
The distribution of my independent variable, gender, was fairly even among the respondents. For a visual representation please refer to Figure 1. In regard to general trends in beliefs about climate change, most of the respondents reported it as a problem that should be addressed. Most of the respondents reported hearing a lot or some information about global warming. Over half of the respondents reported global warming as a serious problem with a high priority. Furthermore, only 13% of respondents reported global warming to have no serious