Environmental Concern: Conceptual and Measurement Issues

Abstract

This paper begins by observing that it would be impossible in a single article to provide an exhaustive review of all the studies on "environmental concern." Instead, the authors attempt to make sense of the literature and to provide a roadmap for the major issues involved with environmental concern as an "attitude object." They first distinguish and evaluate approaches that rely on attitude theory and those approaches that are more policy-relevant. Next, Dunlap and Jones examine specific examples of efforts to measure environmental concern, noting the incredibly diverse measurements and operational definitions that are used. They state that a recurring theme that arises out of the literature is whether environmental concern is inherently multidimensional or whether is can be captured in a single construct. The "environment" is an ambigous object. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Dunlap and Jones state that most studies of environmental concern focused on "readily identifiable attitude objects like local air and water pollution" (483). Attitudes towards topics like toxic waste, acid rain, nuclear power, oone depletion, and climate change began to be measured in the 1980s and 1990s. They note that environmental problems are becoming less localized and less visible, that the causes of these problems are inherently related to complex socical processes, and that problems are continually emerging and seen as interrelated (484). They begin by reconizing that the concept of environmental attiutudes is synonymous with environmetal concern, which reflects attitudes, cognitions, and behavioral intentions. They hope to clarify the meaning of environmental concern. They use facet theory in order to decompose a concept into smaller relevant parts, or facets. Dunlap and Jones create a novel definition of environmental concern as "the degree to which people are aware of problems regarding the environment and support efforts to solve them and/or indicate a willingness to contribute personally to their solution" (485). Environmental concern has two facets: environment and concern. The environmental facet represents the substantive area or particular isuse of environmental concern, whereas concern deals with forms of expression representing concern. Meaures of environmental concern varied on the topics that were focused on as well as the ways in which investigators measured expressions of concern. Past research suggests that the environment can be conceptualized according t…