Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A Revised NEP Scale - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Riley E. Dunlap, Kent D. Van Liere, Angela G. Mertig, Robert Emmet Jones

Riley E. Dunlap [*]

Dunlap and Van Liere 's New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale, published in 1978, has become a widely used measure of proenvironmental orientation. This article develops a revised NEP Scale designed to improve upon the original one in several respects: (1) It taps a wider range of facets of an ecological worldview, (2) It offers a balanced set of pro- and anti-NEP items, and (3) It avoids outmoded terminology. The new scale, termed the New Ecological Paradigm Scale, consists of 15 items. Results of a 1990 Washington State survey suggest that the items can be treated as an internally consistent summated rating scale and also indicate a modest growth in pro-NEP responses among Washington residents over the 14 years since the original study.

When environmental issues achieved a prominent position on our nation's policy agenda in the 1970s, the major problems receiving attention tended to be air and water pollution, loss of aesthetic values, and resource (especially energy) conservation. Consequently, attempts to measure public concern for environmental quality, or "environmental concern," focused primarily on such conditions (e.g., Weigel & Weigel, 1978). In recent decades, however, environmental problems have evolved in significant ways. Although localized pollution, especially hazardous waste, continues to be a major issue, environmental problems have generally tended to become more geographically dispersed, less directly observable, and more ambiguous in origin. Not only do problems such as ozone depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change cover far wider geographical areas (often reaching the global level), but their causes are complex and synergistic and their solutions complicated and problematic (Stem, Young, & Druc kman, 1992). Researchers interested in understanding how the public sees environmental problems are gradually paying attention to these newly emerging "attitude objects" (Stern, Dietz, Kalof, & Guagnano, 1995), and the number of studies of public perceptions of issues such as global warming is slowly mounting (Dunlap, 1998; O'Connor, Bord, & Fisher, 1999).

The emergence of global environmental problems as major policy issues symbolizes the growing awareness of the problematic relationship between modern industrialized societies and the physical environments on which they depend (Stem et al., 1992). Recognition that human activities are altering the ecosystems on which our existence--and that of all other living species--is dependent and growing acknowledgment of the necessity of achieving more sustainable forms of development give credence to suggestions that we are in the midst of a fundamental reevaluation of the underlying worldview that has guided our relationship to the physical environment (e.g., Milbrath, 1984). In particular, suggestions that a more ecologically sound worldview is emerging have gained credibility in the past decade (e.g., Olsen, Lodwick, & Dunlap, 1992).

In this context, it is not surprising to see that traditional measures of "environmental concern" are being supplanted by instruments seeking to measure "ecological consciousness" (Ellis & Thompson, 1997), "anthropocentrism" (Chandler & Dreger, 1993), and "anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism" (Thompson & Barton, 1994). The purpose of this article is to provide a revision of the earliest such measure of endorsement of an ecological worldview, the New Environmental Paradigm Scale (Dunlap & Van Liere, 1978).

The New Environmental Paradigm Scale

Development of the Scale

Sensing that environmentalists were calling for more far-reaching changes than the development of environmental protection policies and stimulated by Pirages and Ehrlich's (1974) explication of the antienvironmental thrust of our society's dominant social paradigm (DSP), in the mid-1970s Dunlap and Van Liere argued that implicit within environmentalism was a challenge to our fundamental views about nature and humans' relationship to it. Their conceptualization of what they called the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) focused on beliefs about humanity's ability to upset the balance of nature, the existence of limits to growth for human societies, and humanity's right to rule over the rest of nature. In a 1976 Washington State study Dunlap and Van Liere (1978) found that a set of 12 Likert items measuring these three facets of the new social paradigm or worldview exhibited a good deal of internal consistency (coefficient alpha of .81), and strongly discriminated between known environmentalists and the general p ublic. Consequently, they argued that the items could legitimately be treated as a New Environmental Paradigm Scale, and found that endorsement of the NEP was, as expected, negatively related to endorsement of the DSP (Dunlap & Van Liere, 1984). [Dunlap and Van Liere later developed a six-item NEP Scale for use in a national survey for the Continental Group (1982) that has subsequently been used by several researchers, particularly political scientists (Pierce, Steger, Steel, & Lovrich, 1992).]